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144144Democracy Now! - Fooden-USDemocracy Now! - FoodValentine’s Day: 20 Stories on Love, Chocolate, Roses, Secrets, Bromance, Break-ups & Diamondshttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/2/13/valentine_s_day_20_stories_on
tag:democracynow.org,2015-02-13:blog/00ced1 For Valentine’s Day, we dug through the Democracy Now! archives to bring you these 20 stories.
1. Love Has No Color
Just two years ago, a group of Georgia high school students made history by challenging the segregation of their high school prom. Watch our interview with two of the students, Mareshia Rucker and Brandon Davis. “I just want people to understand that love has no color,” Rucker told us.
2. Don&#8217;t Wait to Say &#39;I Love You&#39; Today
On Valentine’s Day, hear the voices of ordinary Americans talking about love. Couples recorded endearing stories with the StoryCorps Oral History Project. &quot;Remember to say the things to the people who you love today, and not to wait,&quot; says StoryCorps founder Dave Isay.
3. Bitter Chocolate
Chocolate remains a favorite gift on Valentine&#8217;s Day, but have you thought about where it is made? In 2008, we spoke with journalist Christian Parenti who revealed that little progress had been made in the cocoa industry’s pledges to address child labor. He then debates William Guyton, president of the World Cocoa Foundation.
4. 1 Billion Rising
Years after writing the acclaimed play “The Vagina Monologues,” Eve Ensler is part of a worldwide movement to end violence against women and girls. In 2013, we spoke to her about the launch of the #1BillionRising movement . “One of the greatest things about this movement is how connected we are across borders, across nations, across tribes. And we are in this together. We now know that violence against women is a global phenomenon and isn’t particular to culture or to nations or to families, but it’s something all of us are impacted by.” On Valentine’s Day, people in some 200 countries will be taking part in the #rise4revolution day of action this year.
5. Breakups
Environmental activists are calling on people to take action on Valentine’s Day for the Global Divestment Day , calling on institutions to break-up with investors tied to companies that drive and profit from global warming. Watch our recent interview with James Anderson, professor of chemistry and Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. He is calling on Harvard to join with other colleges and universities divesting from fossil fuels. Harvard’s endowment is the largest of any school in the world, at $36.4 billion.
6. Conflict Diamonds
Every year, Palestinian and Jewish activists gather in New York City to protest Leviev, the world’s largest cutter and polisher of diamonds. The company has been linked to expanding Jewish-only settlements in the Palestinian West Bank and a sketchy human rights record in Angola, where it controls the diamond supply. “We’re calling for a boycott of Leviev and his jewelry store in New York City,” Palestinian lawyer and activist Lubna Mikkel told us in 2008. They continue to ask people to boycott Leviev diamonds today.
7. Secrets
What secrets do you keep with your partner? In 1971, John and Bonnie Raines broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania. They stole every document they found and then leaked many to the press, including details about FBI abuses and the then-secret counter-intelligence program to infiltrate, monitor and disrupt social and political movements, nicknamed COINTELPRO . They joined us last year in an extended interview to reveal this long-time secret story.
8. Chomsky in Love
It was French filmmaker Michel Gondry who got world-renowned political dissident Noam Chomsky talking about love and his late wife, Carol. “Carol was kind of a social butterfly,” Chomsky said. “ I was very solitary. For a couple years, we more or less lived her style of life. But, you know, I’d sit in a corner at the parties.” Gondry appeared on Democracy Now! to tell us about his conversations with Chomsky, which he animated in his film, &quot;Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?&quot;
9. Bromance
“What were the most famous, or not as well known, bromances between top bankers and presidents?” Amy Goodman asked Nomi Prins, author of the book, “All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power.” You&#8217;ll have to watch to find out.
10. Deflowering Ecuador
Planning to buy roses? In 2003, we spoke with reporter Ross Wehner who investigated the women and children who work in the rose industry in Ecuador. “Insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and soil fumigants used in the greenhouses are causing serious health problems for Ecuador’s 60,000 rose workers,” he wrote. “By the time the flowers reach florists and supermarkets across the country, a rose that cost less than 17 cents to produce in Ecuador will sell for as much as $8.”
11. Compassionate Love in Suffering
“It is so hard to describe in words how difficult it is to watch the person you most love in the world suffer immeasurably all day, every day,” says Claudia Cuellar, the wife of Army veteran Tomas Young in this 2013 interview. Young was injured when his unit came under fire in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad, which left him paralyzed and in physical pain. When returning home, he was one of the first veterans to publicly come out against the war. He penned, “The Last Letter: A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran.&quot; He died in 2014.
12. A Very Long Engagement
“Usually people do this because they’re making a commitment, as they say, at the beginning of their lives. For us, it’s at the other end,” said prominent LGBT and marriage-equality activist Edie Windsor, the lead plaintiff in the case that led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the Defense of Marriage Act ( DOMA ) unconstitutional. The story of Windsor’s life and love of her long-time partner Thea Spyer is told in the award-winning documentary, &quot;Edie &amp; Thea: A Very Long Engagement.&quot;
13. Guantánamo Love Story
Prominent British journalist Victoria Brittain joined us in studio in 2013 to talk about her book, &quot;Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror.&quot; We ask her to read an excerpt of the poem written by Zinnira, the wife of Guantánamo prisoner Shaker Aamer. “For her, February the 14th is a special day. It’s not only the day that her youngest child was born, who Shaker has never seen … but it’s also the day, coincidentally, and she didn’t know it while she was giving birth, that Shaker was taken to Guantánamo.”
You are the roof over my head,
You are the shadow that can’t be lead,
You are my voice when the silence breaks,
Your hand I seek, your hand I hold,
Cause you have a heart of gold.
You show me light in the dark,
And you guide me when I am lost,
Your happiness is all I ask,
But your story remains untold,
Cause you have a heart of gold.
14. We Met at a Square Dance
Artist and filmmaker Toshi Seeger died less than two weeks short of what would have been the 70th anniversary of her marriage to legendary musician and activist Pete Seeger. “We met square dancing in New York, and I came to sing for the square dance group and stayed to dance,” Seeger told us in 2013. “I remember she volunteered to help me alphabetize a big mess of songs that I had.” Also, hear him sing, “We Shall Overcome.”
15. Jihad for Love
Muslim gay filmmaker Parvez Sharma spent five-and-a-half years documenting the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims in 12 countries. His subjects include a gay imam in South Africa, an Egyptian who fled to France after his imprisonment and torture, and a lesbian couple in Turkey. “&#8217;Jihad for Love&#8217; is a really important film right now. There’s a battle for the soul of Islam post-September 11th,” Sharma told us in this 2008 interview. “‘Jihad’ is almost an English-language word now. And this whole idea of the Jihad al-Nafs, which is the struggle with the self, and the greater jihad within Islam is rarely spoken about. … This whole idea of taking ‘jihad,’ a very contested word, and putting it right next to ‘love,’ I think is very powerful.
16. Addicted to Love?
Over the years, Canadian physician and bestselling author Dr. Gabor Maté has appeared on Democracy Now! several times. In this interview, he explains how emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders &mdash; and in their healing. Yes, he does talk about “the love chemicals that connect us to the universe and to one another.”
17. A Valentine for the Governor
“I was one of the first to actually come in the building on February 14th, where we delivered hundreds and hundreds of Valentine’s Day cards to the governor,” says then-graduate student Angela Wellman in 2011, when she participated in the massive protests against the policies of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at the state capitol building.
18. Bankster Love
Last year, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement ( TISA ), a trade agreement covering 50 countries and more than 68 percent of world trade in service. “This is a proposal that only banksters can love,” says Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
19. Love Poems
“Mahmoud Darwish is a poet who endlessly tried to renew himself,” said Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American poet who has translated his poetry. Joudah explains that Darwish’s collection of love poems titled “The Stranger’s Bed,” is “a dialogue between his ‘I’ and his feminine ‘I,’ and it incorporates a lot of the fundamentals and traditional canon of love poetry developed into a contemporary and modern form and ideal.” Many of Darwish’s best love poems have become well-known songs throughout the Arab world, because they were set to music by the Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife. Amy Goodman interviewed Khalife in 2007 and asked him about Darwish’s influence on his life. Hear an excerpt of Khalife singing Darwish’s poem “Umi,” or &quot;My Mother.&quot;
20. Fall in Love with Imagination
“I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit,” said renowned author, poet and activist Alice Walker in a public interview with Amy Goodman in 2006. At the end of the interview, she reads her poem, &quot;Be Nobody’s Darling.&quot;
And of course, we send a shout-out of love to all of our Democracy Now! fans! Thank you for tuning in and for sharing our interviews with your loved ones.
For Valentine’s Day, we dug through the Democracy Now! archives to bring you these 20 stories.

Just two years ago, a group of Georgia high school students made history by challenging the segregation of their high school prom. Watch our interview with two of the students, Mareshia Rucker and Brandon Davis. “I just want people to understand that love has no color,” Rucker told us.

On Valentine’s Day, hear the voices of ordinary Americans talking about love. Couples recorded endearing stories with the StoryCorps Oral History Project. "Remember to say the things to the people who you love today, and not to wait," says StoryCorps founder Dave Isay.

Chocolate remains a favorite gift on Valentine’s Day, but have you thought about where it is made? In 2008, we spoke with journalist Christian Parenti who revealed that little progress had been made in the cocoa industry’s pledges to address child labor. He then debates William Guyton, president of the World Cocoa Foundation.

Years after writing the acclaimed play “The Vagina Monologues,” Eve Ensler is part of a worldwide movement to end violence against women and girls. In 2013, we spoke to her about the launch of the #1BillionRising movement. “One of the greatest things about this movement is how connected we are across borders, across nations, across tribes. And we are in this together. We now know that violence against women is a global phenomenon and isn’t particular to culture or to nations or to families, but it’s something all of us are impacted by.” On Valentine’s Day, people in some 200 countries will be taking part in the #rise4revolution day of action this year.

Environmental activists are calling on people to take action on Valentine’s Day for the Global Divestment Day, calling on institutions to break-up with investors tied to companies that drive and profit from global warming. Watch our recent interview with James Anderson, professor of chemistry and Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. He is calling on Harvard to join with other colleges and universities divesting from fossil fuels. Harvard’s endowment is the largest of any school in the world, at $36.4 billion.

Every year, Palestinian and Jewish activists gather in New York City to protest Leviev, the world’s largest cutter and polisher of diamonds. The company has been linked to expanding Jewish-only settlements in the Palestinian West Bank and a sketchy human rights record in Angola, where it controls the diamond supply. “We’re calling for a boycott of Leviev and his jewelry store in New York City,” Palestinian lawyer and activist Lubna Mikkel told us in 2008. They continue to ask people to boycott Leviev diamonds today.

What secrets do you keep with your partner? In 1971, John and Bonnie Raines broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania. They stole every document they found and then leaked many to the press, including details about FBI abuses and the then-secret counter-intelligence program to infiltrate, monitor and disrupt social and political movements, nicknamed COINTELPRO. They joined us last year in an extended interview to reveal this long-time secret story.

It was French filmmaker Michel Gondry who got world-renowned political dissident Noam Chomsky talking about love and his late wife, Carol. “Carol was kind of a social butterfly,” Chomsky said. “ I was very solitary. For a couple years, we more or less lived her style of life. But, you know, I’d sit in a corner at the parties.” Gondry appeared on Democracy Now! to tell us about his conversations with Chomsky, which he animated in his film, "Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?"

“What were the most famous, or not as well known, bromances between top bankers and presidents?” Amy Goodman asked Nomi Prins, author of the book, “All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power.” You’ll have to watch to find out.

Planning to buy roses? In 2003, we spoke with reporter Ross Wehner who investigated the women and children who work in the rose industry in Ecuador. “Insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and soil fumigants used in the greenhouses are causing serious health problems for Ecuador’s 60,000 rose workers,” he wrote. “By the time the flowers reach florists and supermarkets across the country, a rose that cost less than 17 cents to produce in Ecuador will sell for as much as $8.”

“It is so hard to describe in words how difficult it is to watch the person you most love in the world suffer immeasurably all day, every day,” says Claudia Cuellar, the wife of Army veteran Tomas Young in this 2013 interview. Young was injured when his unit came under fire in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad, which left him paralyzed and in physical pain. When returning home, he was one of the first veterans to publicly come out against the war. He penned, “The Last Letter: A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran." He died in 2014.

“Usually people do this because they’re making a commitment, as they say, at the beginning of their lives. For us, it’s at the other end,” said prominent LGBT and marriage-equality activist Edie Windsor, the lead plaintiff in the case that led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional. The story of Windsor’s life and love of her long-time partner Thea Spyer is told in the award-winning documentary, "Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement."

Prominent British journalist Victoria Brittain joined us in studio in 2013 to talk about her book, "Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror." We ask her to read an excerpt of the poem written by Zinnira, the wife of Guantánamo prisoner Shaker Aamer. “For her, February the 14th is a special day. It’s not only the day that her youngest child was born, who Shaker has never seen … but it’s also the day, coincidentally, and she didn’t know it while she was giving birth, that Shaker was taken to Guantánamo.”

You are the roof over my head,
You are the shadow that can’t be lead,
You are my voice when the silence breaks,
Your hand I seek, your hand I hold,
Cause you have a heart of gold.
You show me light in the dark,
And you guide me when I am lost,
Your happiness is all I ask,
But your story remains untold,
Cause you have a heart of gold.

Artist and filmmaker Toshi Seeger died less than two weeks short of what would have been the 70th anniversary of her marriage to legendary musician and activist Pete Seeger. “We met square dancing in New York, and I came to sing for the square dance group and stayed to dance,” Seeger told us in 2013. “I remember she volunteered to help me alphabetize a big mess of songs that I had.” Also, hear him sing, “We Shall Overcome.”

Muslim gay filmmaker Parvez Sharma spent five-and-a-half years documenting the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims in 12 countries. His subjects include a gay imam in South Africa, an Egyptian who fled to France after his imprisonment and torture, and a lesbian couple in Turkey. “’Jihad for Love’ is a really important film right now. There’s a battle for the soul of Islam post-September 11th,” Sharma told us in this 2008 interview. “‘Jihad’ is almost an English-language word now. And this whole idea of the Jihad al-Nafs, which is the struggle with the self, and the greater jihad within Islam is rarely spoken about. … This whole idea of taking ‘jihad,’ a very contested word, and putting it right next to ‘love,’ I think is very powerful.

Over the years, Canadian physician and bestselling author Dr. Gabor Maté has appeared on Democracy Now! several times. In this interview, he explains how emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders — and in their healing. Yes, he does talk about “the love chemicals that connect us to the universe and to one another.”

“I was one of the first to actually come in the building on February 14th, where we delivered hundreds and hundreds of Valentine’s Day cards to the governor,” says then-graduate student Angela Wellman in 2011, when she participated in the massive protests against the policies of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at the state capitol building.

Last year, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), a trade agreement covering 50 countries and more than 68 percent of world trade in service. “This is a proposal that only banksters can love,” says Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

“Mahmoud Darwish is a poet who endlessly tried to renew himself,” said Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American poet who has translated his poetry. Joudah explains that Darwish’s collection of love poems titled “The Stranger’s Bed,” is “a dialogue between his ‘I’ and his feminine ‘I,’ and it incorporates a lot of the fundamentals and traditional canon of love poetry developed into a contemporary and modern form and ideal.” Many of Darwish’s best love poems have become well-known songs throughout the Arab world, because they were set to music by the Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife. Amy Goodman interviewed Khalife in 2007 and asked him about Darwish’s influence on his life. Hear an excerpt of Khalife singing Darwish’s poem “Umi,” or "My Mother."

“I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit,” said renowned author, poet and activist Alice Walker in a public interview with Amy Goodman in 2006. At the end of the interview, she reads her poem, "Be Nobody’s Darling."

And of course, we send a shout-out of love to all of our Democracy Now! fans! Thank you for tuning in and for sharing our interviews with your loved ones.

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Fri, 13 Feb 2015 23:22:00 -0500Food Chains: New Film Tracks How Immokalee Workers Won Fair Wages from Corporate Giantshttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/21/food_chains_new_film_tracks_how
tag:democracynow.org,2014-11-21:en/story/436105 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to a new film that documents the groundbreaking partnership between farm workers, Florida tomato farmers and some of the largest fast-food and grocery chains in the world. It&#8217;s called Food Chains , and it stars actress Eva Longoria and author Eric Schlosser, who are also executive producers. It is narrated by the actor Forest Whitaker.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : We know our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day&#8217;s work with honest wages. Let&#8217;s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.
EVA LONGORIA : Everybody should be concerned with where our food comes from and who picks it.
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: To live hungry while you are working, that&#8217;s not a dignified way of living.
ERIC SCHLOSSER : The defendants have been accused of beating them, locking them inside trailers, chaining them to a pole. These abuses are un-American, they are unacceptable, and they must stop.
The history of farm labor in the United States is a history of exploitation.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY : These people have suffered tremendously and grown much more slowly economically than any other segment of our society.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: If we cannot win this fight, we have lost the soul of America.
BARRY ESTABROOK : I think the entire supermarket business goes out of its way so that you&#8217;re not reminded of where your food came from.
ERIC SCHLOSSER : If you want to make change, you need to look at the people at the very top.
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: We became a little problem for the big corporations.
FOREST WHITAKER : Farm workers in Florida placed the responsibility of fair wages and conditions for workers on the big buyers of tomatoes rather than the farmers.
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: What we want is to establish change.
EVA LONGORIA : I still believe agriculture is the backbone of America. You&#8217;ve got to pay attention to the labor force.
ERIC SCHLOSSER : Most people have no idea that they&#8217;re connected to this system every time they buy fresh fruits and vegetables. If a handful of companies decided that they wanted to eliminate poverty among farm workers, it could happen very, very quickly.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That&#8217;s the trailer for Food Chains , which opens in more than 25 theaters around the country today in both English and Spanish.
AMY GOODMAN : For more, we&#8217;re joined by one of the film&#8217;s key players, Gerardo Reyes-Chávez, farm worker, organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. He has helped lead the group&#8217;s success getting 12 corporations to join their Fair Food Program, including McDonald&#8217;s, Taco Bell and, most recently, the retail giant Wal-Mart in January. Participants agree to pay a premium for the tomatoes in order to support a penny-per-pound bonus that&#8217;s then paid to the tomato pickers. Soon, the Fair Food label will appear on Florida tomatoes at stores participating in the program, including Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Trader Joe&#8217;s.
Gerardo Reyes, welcome back to Democracy Now! , Gerardo Reyes-Chávez. It&#8217;s great to have you with us.
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Thank you so much.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about this latest—well, Wal-Mart, I mean, the world&#8217;s, what, largest retailer, that you got them to sign onto this, what does it mean?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Well, it means a lot of—a lot of things. First and foremost, it means an increase in wages for workers, because Wal-Mart is going to be paying the penny per pound, in the same way that the other 11 retailers have been doing. But also included on that agreement, we have the expansion of the program to cover other states. So, right now the program covers about 30,000 workers in Florida&#8217;s tomato industry, but then, starting in May and June of 2015, that&#8217;s going to expand to every state along the East Coastal line.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One question—some companies have yet to sign on, and I know when I was out at Ohio State, there was already a student movement there trying to get the university to divest from Wendy&#8217;s, because Wendy&#8217;s is one of the companies that has refused to join your program. Could you talk about the divestment movement on this issue?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Yeah, there is—well, interestingly enough, when we started the campaign, we were asking Taco Bell to join, to pay the penny per pound, to condition their purchasing—to cut purchasing, if necessary, when growers would refuse to fix any of the problems in the fields. And at that time, Emil Brolick was president of Taco Bell. Now he&#8217;s the CEO of Wendy&#8217;s. And the students know that they have a lot of power. They already showed that to Mr. Brolick. And for some reason, he&#8217;s trying to resist that. But at the end, I feel that the movement, the consumers, but mainly the students, are going to have a lot, a lot to say about it. So it&#8217;s just a matter of time before Wendy&#8217;s come on board, we feel.
AMY GOODMAN : I see you have—one of the papers you have in front of you is a Wendy&#8217;s protest. Which protest is this in the country?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Well, as part of the film, that you were mentioning a little bit earlier, there&#8217;s going to be about 12 protests, and more that are being organized, over the weekend of the 21st and some protests over the weekend of the 28th. So, we have protests here in New York on Saturday at 3:00 p.m. after the screening at the Quad Cinema. We&#8217;re going to march from Union Square to Broadway to protest Wendy&#8217;s.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to play another clip from Food Chains , which describes how supermarkets are controlling prices and squeezing farmers and farm workers. We hear from the actress Eva Longoria, agribusiness expert Shane Hamilton and farmer Jon Esformes. But first, author Eric Schlosser.
ERIC SCHLOSSER : I think it would be easy to demonize farmers and hold them responsible for the poor wages of migrants. That might have been true in some cases 30 years ago, 40 years ago, but that&#8217;s not really the problem today. If you want to make change, I think you need to look at the people who have the real power to make the lives of farm workers better, and those are the people at the very top.
FOREST WHITAKER : Farm workers are the foundation of a massive supply chain that includes farmers and distributors, but that is dominated by fast food, food service and supermarkets, like Publix. The power of supermarkets is rooted in their gross revenue. They earn more than Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Apple.
EVA LONGORIA : When you talk about grocery chains, it is very, very easy for them to bully the small farmers. They are being villainized, and they know they&#8217;re being villainized. But their hands are tied.
SHANE HAMILTON : It&#8217;s a very difficult world for most farmers. Certainly, there is this nostalgic vision of, you know, the small family farm, where there was much more control over who you paid and how much they got paid. I think there is a sense now that everybody is deeply interdependent on this entire supply chain.
JON ESFORMES : Agriculture is doing great, as long as you&#8217;re not a farmer. There has become such a disconnect over the last 30 years between the ultimate point of sale and the actual production.
AMY GOODMAN : Another excerpt of the [film] Food Chains . It&#8217;s opening around the country this weekend. Finally, Gerardo, what you&#8217;re hoping to accomplish with this film beyond this weekend?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Well, we expect people to take action, because the beauty of this film is—the difference between this film and many documentaries is that this is an ongoing story. This is a story that people can build on as we are talking about it. The campaign for Fair Food is very well and alive, and we hope that people will join it. Cities like D.C. are preparing to do a protest, as well—Los Angeles, Denver, Tampa, Orlando, Chicago. There&#8217;s many people that are organizing actions in support of the campaign for Fair Food. And what we expect is for people to take this as an opportunity to be able to unite with the farm workers of Immokalee in this effort that we have to transform the tomato industry and, in the future, to be able to do much more for the workers in the fields of this nation.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, Gerardo, thanks so much for being with us. Gerardo Reyes-Chávez, farm worker and organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, featured in the new film Food Chains , which is out in 25 theaters around the country this weekend.
This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . Coming up, it&#8217;s the 10th anniversary of the first edition of Voices of a People&#8217;s History of the United States by the late, great historian Howard Zinn. We&#8217;ll be joined by actor Viggo Mortensen and Anthony Arnove, the editor of the volume. Stay with us. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to a new film that documents the groundbreaking partnership between farm workers, Florida tomato farmers and some of the largest fast-food and grocery chains in the world. It’s called Food Chains, and it stars actress Eva Longoria and author Eric Schlosser, who are also executive producers. It is narrated by the actor Forest Whitaker.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: We know our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages. Let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.

EVALONGORIA: Everybody should be concerned with where our food comes from and who picks it.

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: To live hungry while you are working, that’s not a dignified way of living.

ERICSCHLOSSER: The defendants have been accused of beating them, locking them inside trailers, chaining them to a pole. These abuses are un-American, they are unacceptable, and they must stop.

The history of farm labor in the United States is a history of exploitation.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY: These people have suffered tremendously and grown much more slowly economically than any other segment of our society.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: If we cannot win this fight, we have lost the soul of America.

BARRYESTABROOK: I think the entire supermarket business goes out of its way so that you’re not reminded of where your food came from.

ERICSCHLOSSER: If you want to make change, you need to look at the people at the very top.

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: We became a little problem for the big corporations.

FORESTWHITAKER: Farm workers in Florida placed the responsibility of fair wages and conditions for workers on the big buyers of tomatoes rather than the farmers.

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: What we want is to establish change.

EVALONGORIA: I still believe agriculture is the backbone of America. You’ve got to pay attention to the labor force.

ERICSCHLOSSER: Most people have no idea that they’re connected to this system every time they buy fresh fruits and vegetables. If a handful of companies decided that they wanted to eliminate poverty among farm workers, it could happen very, very quickly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That’s the trailer for Food Chains, which opens in more than 25 theaters around the country today in both English and Spanish.

AMYGOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by one of the film’s key players, Gerardo Reyes-Chávez, farm worker, organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. He has helped lead the group’s success getting 12 corporations to join their Fair Food Program, including McDonald’s, Taco Bell and, most recently, the retail giant Wal-Mart in January. Participants agree to pay a premium for the tomatoes in order to support a penny-per-pound bonus that’s then paid to the tomato pickers. Soon, the Fair Food label will appear on Florida tomatoes at stores participating in the program, including Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s.

Gerardo Reyes, welcome back to Democracy Now!, Gerardo Reyes-Chávez. It’s great to have you with us.

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Thank you so much.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about this latest—well, Wal-Mart, I mean, the world’s, what, largest retailer, that you got them to sign onto this, what does it mean?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Well, it means a lot of—a lot of things. First and foremost, it means an increase in wages for workers, because Wal-Mart is going to be paying the penny per pound, in the same way that the other 11 retailers have been doing. But also included on that agreement, we have the expansion of the program to cover other states. So, right now the program covers about 30,000 workers in Florida’s tomato industry, but then, starting in May and June of 2015, that’s going to expand to every state along the East Coastal line.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One question—some companies have yet to sign on, and I know when I was out at Ohio State, there was already a student movement there trying to get the university to divest from Wendy’s, because Wendy’s is one of the companies that has refused to join your program. Could you talk about the divestment movement on this issue?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Yeah, there is—well, interestingly enough, when we started the campaign, we were asking Taco Bell to join, to pay the penny per pound, to condition their purchasing—to cut purchasing, if necessary, when growers would refuse to fix any of the problems in the fields. And at that time, Emil Brolick was president of Taco Bell. Now he’s the CEO of Wendy’s. And the students know that they have a lot of power. They already showed that to Mr. Brolick. And for some reason, he’s trying to resist that. But at the end, I feel that the movement, the consumers, but mainly the students, are going to have a lot, a lot to say about it. So it’s just a matter of time before Wendy’s come on board, we feel.

AMYGOODMAN: I see you have—one of the papers you have in front of you is a Wendy’s protest. Which protest is this in the country?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Well, as part of the film, that you were mentioning a little bit earlier, there’s going to be about 12 protests, and more that are being organized, over the weekend of the 21st and some protests over the weekend of the 28th. So, we have protests here in New York on Saturday at 3:00 p.m. after the screening at the Quad Cinema. We’re going to march from Union Square to Broadway to protest Wendy’s.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to play another clip from Food Chains, which describes how supermarkets are controlling prices and squeezing farmers and farm workers. We hear from the actress Eva Longoria, agribusiness expert Shane Hamilton and farmer Jon Esformes. But first, author Eric Schlosser.

ERICSCHLOSSER: I think it would be easy to demonize farmers and hold them responsible for the poor wages of migrants. That might have been true in some cases 30 years ago, 40 years ago, but that’s not really the problem today. If you want to make change, I think you need to look at the people who have the real power to make the lives of farm workers better, and those are the people at the very top.

FORESTWHITAKER: Farm workers are the foundation of a massive supply chain that includes farmers and distributors, but that is dominated by fast food, food service and supermarkets, like Publix. The power of supermarkets is rooted in their gross revenue. They earn more than Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Apple.

EVALONGORIA: When you talk about grocery chains, it is very, very easy for them to bully the small farmers. They are being villainized, and they know they’re being villainized. But their hands are tied.

SHANEHAMILTON: It’s a very difficult world for most farmers. Certainly, there is this nostalgic vision of, you know, the small family farm, where there was much more control over who you paid and how much they got paid. I think there is a sense now that everybody is deeply interdependent on this entire supply chain.

JONESFORMES: Agriculture is doing great, as long as you’re not a farmer. There has become such a disconnect over the last 30 years between the ultimate point of sale and the actual production.

AMYGOODMAN: Another excerpt of the [film] Food Chains. It’s opening around the country this weekend. Finally, Gerardo, what you’re hoping to accomplish with this film beyond this weekend?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Well, we expect people to take action, because the beauty of this film is—the difference between this film and many documentaries is that this is an ongoing story. This is a story that people can build on as we are talking about it. The campaign for Fair Food is very well and alive, and we hope that people will join it. Cities like D.C. are preparing to do a protest, as well—Los Angeles, Denver, Tampa, Orlando, Chicago. There’s many people that are organizing actions in support of the campaign for Fair Food. And what we expect is for people to take this as an opportunity to be able to unite with the farm workers of Immokalee in this effort that we have to transform the tomato industry and, in the future, to be able to do much more for the workers in the fields of this nation.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, Gerardo, thanks so much for being with us. Gerardo Reyes-Chávez, farm worker and organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, featured in the new film Food Chains, which is out in 25 theaters around the country this weekend.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Coming up, it’s the 10th anniversary of the first edition of Voices of a People’s History of the United States by the late, great historian Howard Zinn. We’ll be joined by actor Viggo Mortensen and Anthony Arnove, the editor of the volume. Stay with us.

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Fri, 21 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0500"The GMO Deception": Sheldon Krimsky on How BigAg & the Government Is Putting Your Food at Riskhttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/10/31/the_gmo_deception_sheldon_krimsky_on
tag:democracynow.org,2014-10-31:blog/3c13c8 Watch part 2 of our conversation with Sheldon Krimsky, editor of The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . He is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. Professor Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.
Click here to watch part 1 of this interview.
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. Seventy-five percent of processed foods on supermarket shelves in the United States—from cracker, to soda, to soup—contain genetically engineered ingredients. Public concern has been steadily intensifying. The Vermont Legislature has passed a GMO labeling law, and now voters in Colorado and Oregon are voting on GMA labeling ballot initiatives.
Sheldon Krimsky is with us today, the editor and author of several contributions in the new book, The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . He is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. Professor Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.
Welcome to Democracy Now! for part two of our conversation. Now, you tell a remarkable story about the scientists who get destroyed as they attempt to look at GMO foods. But before we do, what is the problem with genetically modified foods? Why in the United States are 75 percent of our foods have ingredients that are genetically modified, but in Europe, in state after state, it&#8217;s completely outlawed? Why the difference?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The Europeans operate on the precautionary principle. They say, if you introduce a new product on the market, you should evaluate it before the consumers get a chance to purchase it. In America, we made a decision that genetically modified foods are safe before you even have to test it. So the government never required tests for GMOs in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN : Who made that decision?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, that decision was made by a commission, first of all, in the United States headed by Dan Quayle, and then it was—
AMY GOODMAN : The vice president under President Bush.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, yes, that&#8217;s correct. And by the 1990s, the decision was made how to divide the regulatory authority over genetically modified organisms—plants, animals, etc. And there were three agencies. The EPA would deal with environmental effects. USDA would be dealing with how it affects agriculture. And the FDA would be addressing the questions of human health.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, why are you concerned?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, because we have some evidence that animal studies can produce adverse effects when fed GMOs. There have been many studies. Many of them have said there&#8217;s no effects. But a few of them—I found 22 studies.
AMY GOODMAN : Give an example of one of these studies.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, one of these studies was published in one of the most important journals in international journals. It&#8217;s called The Lancet . It started publishing—
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s the British medical journal.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The British medical journal. It&#8217;s among the most prestigious journals in the world. And that was published in 1999 by a scientist who lived in Britain for 50 years—originally he was born in Hungary—Árpád Pusztai. And he was a researcher at the Rowett Institute. And he published a study which showed that his animals were harmed when fed a genetically modified potato.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to this scientist, to the biochemist, the nutritionist, Árpád Pusztai, world authority, as you said, actually on plant lectins, authoring some 270 papers, three books on the topic. In 1998, the scientist published research that showed feeding genetically modified potatoes to rats caused harm to their stomach lining and immune system. This led to a backlash against Dr. Pusztai and his subsequent suspension from his academic home, the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland. Let&#8217;s turn to a clip of Pusztai explaining the experiment he did using these genetically modified potatoes, the experiment that unleashed such a firestorm of criticism.
ÁRPÁD PUSZTAI : What we did was that, first, we took the genetically modified potatoes and put as much as possible of this into the diet, and we fed rats on it for a short time, 10 days. That&#8217;s an appropriate time in most of the nutritional studies as a sort of preliminary, short-term study. And we found that there were some problems. And then we said, &quot;Oh, but it is—is it possible that if we dilute it with a good protein, a non-GM protein, would these problems disappear? Would you dilute them out? So when we did that, we found that, no, it didn&#8217;t. The problems persisted, and particularly the problems affecting the gastrointestinal tract of the rats.
The problems were that the genetically modified potatoes induced what we call a proliferative growth in the small intestine. And I shall explain what it means. But before I do that, the most important thing was that we pre-selected the gene that its product should not do that. So, we spent six-and-a-half years of selecting out a gene whose product wouldn&#8217;t do the thing which we did see in the genetically modified potatoes.
AMY GOODMAN : So, Professor Sheldon Krimsky, that&#8217;s Árpád Pusztai.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain further what exactly he&#8217;s saying. Now, he was actually not critical of these genetically modified potatoes that he fed to rats, right?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : That&#8217;s correct. And his institute had a patent on those potatoes. I mean, after all, if you can produce a potato that would be resistant to insects, then you&#8217;d save money on pesticides, and you might be able to, you know, have a product that would be worthy of pesticidal properties. So he took protein from a flower, a snowdrop flower. And that protein—the genetics for that protein was put into the potato. But he honestly believed that he would have a safe outcome. He had already done an experiment with genetically modified peas, which did not show adverse effects on animals. And he felt that—the protein that he used, he fed to the animals when it wasn&#8217;t in the potato, so he felt the protein from the plant was going to be safe. And then he put it into the genetically modified potato, and then he fed it to the animals when it was embedded into the potato. And that&#8217;s when it caused the effects.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain again the effects.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, the effects he found were effects of the stomach lining of the animals, that there were proliferative growths in the stomach lining and other abnormalities in the intestines of the animals.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain then—so he did this scientific experiment. That&#8217;s what he found. It&#8217;s published in this very prestigious journal, Lancet .
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : So what happened to him, Dr. Pusztai?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, first of all, he published in Lancet in 1999. And prior to that, 1995, Scotland had put out a request for scientific studies to evaluate genetically modified food. So he put in one of those requests. At the time, he was the project director of eight projects. He was very well respected and had written a number of books on these lectins, which are insecticidal proteins. The plants themselves have proteins that resist insects. That&#8217;s how they survived all those years. So, his project was accepted by the council in Scotland, and then he did the research for it. So it was already reviewed before it was accepted for funding. And he got 1.3 million pounds to do the study. That&#8217;s where it began.
Prior to publishing his study in The Lancet , he was asked to appear on television. And he&#8217;s not a political—you know, he&#8217;s not a politicized scientist. He was naive. He went on television, with the approval of the director of the Rowett Institute. And the Rowett Institute, for one day, was very excited, because they got publicity being on TV with his research. The day after, all of a sudden, all of the phone calls started coming into the Rowett Institute, political phone calls from politicians—Tony Blair&#8217;s office, etc. And then, within a day, he was dismissed from his position. Within a day, this man who had been working there for decades and had such a prominent position, all of a sudden, lost his entire position.
AMY GOODMAN : Dismissed on what grounds?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : He did not have tenure, the way we do in universities—dismissed because they felt—they believed his research was not good. At least that&#8217;s what they said. What they didn&#8217;t say was that there were political pressures on the institute to devalue and diminish and marginalize his study.
AMY GOODMAN : What was Blair&#8217;s interest, the prime minister at the time, in negating, in going after the scientist, in genetically modified food?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The United States had been the primary country that&#8217;s promoting biotechnology and trying to transfer it all over the world. So, the Clinton administration was very high on biotechnology. It&#8217;s going to rejuvenate American high technology and create many jobs, etc., and be able to spread it throughout the world. Blair was very interested in getting biotechnology into Britain. So, the U.S. government and the British government were both very interested in pushing biotechnology. And, of course, in the background were the corporations who were politicking those two governments to make sure that biotechnology had an easy road to success.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to turn to another scientist. In 2012, French scientists carried out a study linking pesticide-treated, genetically modified corn with cancer in lab rats. The journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology initially published the report but later retracted it amidst controversy. The scientists stood by their findings, releasing a statement that read in part, quote, &quot;Censorship of research into the risks of a technology so intertwined with global food safety undermines the value and credibility of science.&quot; Their article was republished this year in a different journal, Environmental Sciences Europe . I want to turn for a moment to the lead author on the study, Gilles-Éric Séralini. He recently told ME-TV what happened to the rats that were fed genetically modified corn and Roundup weed killer.
GILLES -ÉRIC SÉRALINI: Abnormalities in livers and kidneys, inflammations and pathologies, and we had also inversion of sexual hormones and also breast tumors.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s the scientist, Gilles-Éric Séralini. If you can, Professor Krimsky, explain further what he found.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, he found organ failure. First of all, he did one of the first long-term experiments. So, in other words, he did an experiment on the rats that lasted for a couple of years. Usually they would do a 90-day experiment on the animals. So this was a long-term experiment, which really was needed, because some of these effects you won&#8217;t see right away. And his results showed damage to organs, kidneys, and also proliferation of tumors at a much higher rate than the controls. And after his results came out, there was another surge of vilification of his work and his research and his reputation, on and on and on.
A few very unusual things happened. The first you mentioned, that his journal first supported him and said, &quot;We have a very good refereed system, and he passed the referees,&quot; to get into this peer-reviewed journal. Within a year, however, they changed their mind, because of the political pressure that there was a solid journal, American U.S. journal, that said there were problems with one of the genetically modified products. So, the journal went ahead and retracted his article, without his permission.
And then they gave the reason for the retraction. And this is where a hundred scientists had signed a petition saying that the reasons they gave were not only unorthodox, they violated international standards. The reason they gave was very explicit. They said, &quot;There is no fraud. There is no clear mistakes in this paper. The results were not definitive, and that&#8217;s why we&#8217;re retracting it.&quot; Now, if you use that criteria, you would have to retract 95 percent of all published work.
AMY GOODMAN : What does &quot;definitive&quot; mean?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, &quot;definitive&quot; means that it hasn&#8217;t resolved the controversy, that some people still believe that maybe he didn&#8217;t have enough rats. Maybe they would have changed the methodology slightly differently. There isn&#8217;t an experiment in toxicology that can be done which doesn&#8217;t have some shortcomings. Everybody knows that.
AMY GOODMAN : Or you reach a kind of critical mass in your studies indicating a trend; no one study actually proves it.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Exactly. There&#8217;s no single study that can absolutely definitively prove it, so you need follow-up studies to account for criticisms or larger numbers of animals, etc.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor Krimsky, can you explain what &quot;the funding effect&quot; is, a term you&#8217;ve coined with your colleagues?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Many years ago, we began looking at what happens to scientific research when it&#8217;s heavily funded by corporate interests. And we started by looking at drug research. And as a result of publishing a few papers, other people started doing these studies, and there is now a body of research in the drug industry which shows that corporate funding of research tends to produce the outcomes favorable to the financial interests of the corporation. That&#8217;s what we mean by &quot;the funding effect.&quot; You have to show that the effect exists for any particular area. You can&#8217;t just assume it exists. So there are methods for showing that there is a funding effect. We&#8217;ve shown it in tobacco, we&#8217;ve shown it for drug research, in the best journals that we have, that have accepted these studies. And now people are beginning to look at it in other fields, like chemical toxins and GMOs.
AMY GOODMAN : How are other countries dealing with genetically modified foods?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, it&#8217;s interesting, because when you look at the studies that have been done that have negative outcomes—and I say I found 22 of them in the literature—they&#8217;re almost all done by European scientists. In order to do a study of a genetically modified plant seed in the United States, you have to have funding. Funding doesn&#8217;t come from the federal government, because the federal government has said, &quot;We don&#8217;t need information about this.&quot; So the only funding that can produce these results is funding from corporations.
Secondly, you have to have permission from the company that manufactures the seeds to do this kind of research, to get the seeds, the special seeds that you need from the company. And they won&#8217;t release the seeds. So, people like Pusztai and Professor Séralini—well, Pusztai produced his own potato. Séralini had to get the seeds from some other source, not from the company. Pusztai could not get seeds from Monsanto. Monsanto signs—everyone who purchases seeds from Monsanto has to sign a contract with them. And one of the provisions of that contract is they cannot save their seeds, and they cannot deliver their seeds to some institute for study. In other words, Monsanto has complete control over the seeds, as well as other companies, so that it&#8217;s not even possible for researchers to do the work they need to do, unless they get permission from the companies.
AMY GOODMAN : How do you respond to the claim that GMOs will feed the world? Explain also the difference between genetically modified vegetables, plants—wait, can you respond to the claim that GMOs will feed the world, genetically modified organisms?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, this claim has been made by a number of people, but there&#8217;s no evidence for it. It may very well be that for a certain farm in a certain region, that a particular GMO might give them higher productivity in that particular area. But the world is filled with different regions of, you know, ecological regions, and seeds that work in one region do not necessarily work in another region. That&#8217;s what we call agroecology. We have to understand that you have to match the seed to the region, and not match the region to the seed. That&#8217;s why you don&#8217;t necessarily have high productivity in every region of the world. Some of the Indian farmers did not get high productivity with GMOs. And unfortunately, some of them committed suicide.
AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The Indian farmers had a high rate of suicide in the last few years, and that&#8217;s because many of them got into intense debt, and they couldn&#8217;t pay their debt. And in their mental capacity, they felt the only way to deal with this was to take their lives, unfortunately. Part of that debt was due to the fact that they were purchasing GMO seeds, which were at a higher rate than the seeds that they were originally purchasing.
AMY GOODMAN : Democracy Now! just traveled to Austria, and I was speaking to an Austrian farmer who was saying, &quot;We recognized in our country, which is why we made it GMO -free,&quot; he said, &quot;that you can&#8217;t have an organic farm next to a farm that&#8217;s growing genetically modified plants, because there is drift, and you can&#8217;t honestly have—say something is organic if you&#8217;re right nearby something that isn&#8217;t.&quot;
SHELDON KRIMSKY : That&#8217;s correct. And the pollen flows can flow quite a distance, a number of kilometers, so that in the United States, if you have an organic farm, there&#8217;s no protections for that organic farmer from the drift of pollen from another farm.
AMY GOODMAN : In fact, hasn&#8217;t Monsanto famously sued farmers, saying that they stole their genetically modified seeds, when in fact they drifted onto their property?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : As far as we know, the evidence suggests that the Canadian farmer that had the genetically modified plants didn&#8217;t—
AMY GOODMAN : This is Percy Schmeiser?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, Schmeiser. As far as we know, evidence that I have is that he did not plant those seeds, that those seeds had drifted into his farm. And Monsanto sued him for intellectual property theft. And in some bizarre ruling of the Canadian court, Monsanto won. But the penalty was very, very low, like a dollar or something like that. So, Monsanto won, but Schmeiser didn&#8217;t have to pay a severe penalty.
AMY GOODMAN : Earlier this year, Vermont became the first state to approve GMO labeling with the passage of HB 112. The legality of the decision is now being challenged by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and other national organizations, which have come together to file a lawsuit in federal court. The Grocery Manufacturers Association put out a statement that read in part, quote, &quot;Consumers who prefer to avoid GM ingredients have the option to choose from an array of products already in the marketplace labeled &#39;certified organic.&#39; The government therefore has no compelling interest in warning consumers about foods containing GM ingredients, making HB 112&#8217;s legality suspect at best.&quot; Your response to this, Professor Krimsky?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, it is true that right now, under government standards, if a product is classified as organic—and there are criteria for that, including non-GMO—that there is some level of confidence that they won&#8217;t contain GMO products. But organic costs a lot of money. So there might be food companies that want to put out food that wouldn&#8217;t be classified as organic, but would be classified as non- GMO . Just like there are plastic companies that want to put out their plastics and say, &quot;We don&#8217;t contain bisphenol A in our plastics,&quot; because there&#8217;s been a lot of evidence that it might be harmful, and therefore consumers have the right to buy something that says, &quot;No bisphenol A in this substance,&quot; they should have the right to buy some food products that say, you know, &quot;No GMOs,&quot; even though they&#8217;re not classified as organic, because the prices might be quite different.
AMY GOODMAN : Backers of GMOs cite the success of genetically modified papaya in Hawaii. It was designed to resist a virus that was killing off the fruit crop. It&#8217;s the only commercially grown GMO fruit in the United States. According to The New York Times , &quot;after an outbreak of Papaya ringspot virus in the mid-’90s, only the Rainbow, endowed with a gene from the virus itself that effectively gave it immunity, had saved the crop.&quot; Your response to that, Professor Krimsky?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : You know, one of the issues about biotechnology is that they try to put into the crop a pesticidal property. And in theory, you know, one might think that this would be terrific. You include the pesticide or the herbicide-resistant/tolerant into the crop. But nature has its own way of adapting. So if you put in herbicide-resistant into the crop, eventually the weeds will get resistant to the herbicide that you use. And that&#8217;s in fact what&#8217;s happening with glyphosate, which is the most widely used herbicide now in the United States. So, they have plants which are glyphosate-resistant, so you can spray all the herbicide on your plant; it&#8217;ll kill everything else. But the weeds have adapted to it. So now they need a next generation of herbicide in the plant. So, the whole theory that you can introduce into the plants some magical protein that is going to be sustainable is just not a viable theory.
AMY GOODMAN : Are you referring to the superweeds that are growing throughout the West?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The superweeds, exactly. And now the farmers are saying, &quot;Hey, we bought into this glyphosate resistance, and now we&#8217;re getting these weeds that are in fact resistant to the glyphosate.&quot; And now they&#8217;re introducing a second generation. And one of the products that they&#8217;re trying to introduce is 2,4-D, which was used in the Vietnam War as part of the herbicides, defoliants.
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;re talking about Agent Orange. So—
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, it was part of the Agent Orange mix. And I have to say, Rachel Carson cited 2,4-D as a suspect chemical in her 1962 classic book, Silent Spring .
AMY GOODMAN : Considered the mother of the modern environmental movement, she would later die of cancer herself.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, the significance of the ballot initiatives in Colorado and Oregon? In California and Washington state, genetically modified labeling bills failed.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Is there anything different about Colorado and Oregon right now?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Colorado is always different. It&#8217;s a very single-minded, independent state that pushed the boundaries beyond belief in terms of, you know, legislation on marijuana, etc. If any state can do it, they have a very high consciousness for environmental issues. And if they do do it, I think it&#8217;ll cascade to other states, because I think the fear that the prices will skyrocket is just a scare tactic, it&#8217;s not real. We have companies that issue milk that say, &quot;No bovine growth hormone used to make this milk,&quot; and it hasn&#8217;t skyrocketed the price of milk. So—
AMY GOODMAN : It&#8217;s interesting that Ben &amp; Jerry&#8217;s and the Denver-based Chipotle company, the chain, food chain Chipotle—
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —have actually come out in support of GMO labeling, whereas you&#8217;ve got Pepsi and Kraft Foods and, well, most importantly, Monsanto pouring millions into the anti-labeling movement.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yeah. You know, the corporations don&#8217;t want a patchwork of regulations. I could understand that. They always would rather have one regulation that applies to everyone. And so, from their standpoint, they don&#8217;t want to have to make an adjustment to Colorado and an adjustment to this other state. But that doesn&#8217;t—
AMY GOODMAN : Well, they wouldn&#8217;t have to make an adjustment. If it was passed in Colorado and Oregon, they could just identify genetically modified foods all over the country.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : That&#8217;s correct. That&#8217;s correct.
AMY GOODMAN : You know, so goes Oregon and Colorado, so goes the nation.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : And that&#8217;s exactly what happens when California passes as an initiative on a toxic chemical. The companies just list it on the product, and every state, every community, has access to that information. It&#8217;s just a question of open information, which is really supposed to be at the groundwork of American capitalism. Keep the information open.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you very much, Professor Sheldon Krimsky, editor and author of The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know About the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . You can read an introduction on our website at democracynow.org. Professor Krimsky teaches urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well, adjunct professor at the Tufts School of Medicine. Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics. This is Democracy Now! I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
Watch part 2 of our conversation with Sheldon Krimsky, editor of The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk. He is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. Professor Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.

AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Seventy-five percent of processed foods on supermarket shelves in the United States—from cracker, to soda, to soup—contain genetically engineered ingredients. Public concern has been steadily intensifying. The Vermont Legislature has passed a GMO labeling law, and now voters in Colorado and Oregon are voting on GMA labeling ballot initiatives.

Sheldon Krimsky is with us today, the editor and author of several contributions in the new book, The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk. He is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. Professor Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.

Welcome to Democracy Now! for part two of our conversation. Now, you tell a remarkable story about the scientists who get destroyed as they attempt to look at GMO foods. But before we do, what is the problem with genetically modified foods? Why in the United States are 75 percent of our foods have ingredients that are genetically modified, but in Europe, in state after state, it’s completely outlawed? Why the difference?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: The Europeans operate on the precautionary principle. They say, if you introduce a new product on the market, you should evaluate it before the consumers get a chance to purchase it. In America, we made a decision that genetically modified foods are safe before you even have to test it. So the government never required tests for GMOs in the United States.

AMYGOODMAN: Who made that decision?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, that decision was made by a commission, first of all, in the United States headed by Dan Quayle, and then it was—

AMYGOODMAN: The vice president under President Bush.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Yes, yes, that’s correct. And by the 1990s, the decision was made how to divide the regulatory authority over genetically modified organisms—plants, animals, etc. And there were three agencies. The EPA would deal with environmental effects. USDA would be dealing with how it affects agriculture. And the FDA would be addressing the questions of human health.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, why are you concerned?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, because we have some evidence that animal studies can produce adverse effects when fed GMOs. There have been many studies. Many of them have said there’s no effects. But a few of them—I found 22 studies.

AMYGOODMAN: Give an example of one of these studies.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, one of these studies was published in one of the most important journals in international journals. It’s called The Lancet. It started publishing—

AMYGOODMAN: That’s the British medical journal.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: The British medical journal. It’s among the most prestigious journals in the world. And that was published in 1999 by a scientist who lived in Britain for 50 years—originally he was born in Hungary—Árpád Pusztai. And he was a researcher at the Rowett Institute. And he published a study which showed that his animals were harmed when fed a genetically modified potato.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to this scientist, to the biochemist, the nutritionist, Árpád Pusztai, world authority, as you said, actually on plant lectins, authoring some 270 papers, three books on the topic. In 1998, the scientist published research that showed feeding genetically modified potatoes to rats caused harm to their stomach lining and immune system. This led to a backlash against Dr. Pusztai and his subsequent suspension from his academic home, the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland. Let’s turn to a clip of Pusztai explaining the experiment he did using these genetically modified potatoes, the experiment that unleashed such a firestorm of criticism.

ÁRPÁD PUSZTAI: What we did was that, first, we took the genetically modified potatoes and put as much as possible of this into the diet, and we fed rats on it for a short time, 10 days. That’s an appropriate time in most of the nutritional studies as a sort of preliminary, short-term study. And we found that there were some problems. And then we said, "Oh, but it is—is it possible that if we dilute it with a good protein, a non-GM protein, would these problems disappear? Would you dilute them out? So when we did that, we found that, no, it didn’t. The problems persisted, and particularly the problems affecting the gastrointestinal tract of the rats.

The problems were that the genetically modified potatoes induced what we call a proliferative growth in the small intestine. And I shall explain what it means. But before I do that, the most important thing was that we pre-selected the gene that its product should not do that. So, we spent six-and-a-half years of selecting out a gene whose product wouldn’t do the thing which we did see in the genetically modified potatoes.

AMYGOODMAN: So, Professor Sheldon Krimsky, that’s Árpád Pusztai.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: Explain further what exactly he’s saying. Now, he was actually not critical of these genetically modified potatoes that he fed to rats, right?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: That’s correct. And his institute had a patent on those potatoes. I mean, after all, if you can produce a potato that would be resistant to insects, then you’d save money on pesticides, and you might be able to, you know, have a product that would be worthy of pesticidal properties. So he took protein from a flower, a snowdrop flower. And that protein—the genetics for that protein was put into the potato. But he honestly believed that he would have a safe outcome. He had already done an experiment with genetically modified peas, which did not show adverse effects on animals. And he felt that—the protein that he used, he fed to the animals when it wasn’t in the potato, so he felt the protein from the plant was going to be safe. And then he put it into the genetically modified potato, and then he fed it to the animals when it was embedded into the potato. And that’s when it caused the effects.

AMYGOODMAN: And explain again the effects.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, the effects he found were effects of the stomach lining of the animals, that there were proliferative growths in the stomach lining and other abnormalities in the intestines of the animals.

AMYGOODMAN: And explain then—so he did this scientific experiment. That’s what he found. It’s published in this very prestigious journal, Lancet.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: So what happened to him, Dr. Pusztai?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, first of all, he published in Lancet in 1999. And prior to that, 1995, Scotland had put out a request for scientific studies to evaluate genetically modified food. So he put in one of those requests. At the time, he was the project director of eight projects. He was very well respected and had written a number of books on these lectins, which are insecticidal proteins. The plants themselves have proteins that resist insects. That’s how they survived all those years. So, his project was accepted by the council in Scotland, and then he did the research for it. So it was already reviewed before it was accepted for funding. And he got 1.3 million pounds to do the study. That’s where it began.

Prior to publishing his study in The Lancet, he was asked to appear on television. And he’s not a political—you know, he’s not a politicized scientist. He was naive. He went on television, with the approval of the director of the Rowett Institute. And the Rowett Institute, for one day, was very excited, because they got publicity being on TV with his research. The day after, all of a sudden, all of the phone calls started coming into the Rowett Institute, political phone calls from politicians—Tony Blair’s office, etc. And then, within a day, he was dismissed from his position. Within a day, this man who had been working there for decades and had such a prominent position, all of a sudden, lost his entire position.

AMYGOODMAN: Dismissed on what grounds?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: He did not have tenure, the way we do in universities—dismissed because they felt—they believed his research was not good. At least that’s what they said. What they didn’t say was that there were political pressures on the institute to devalue and diminish and marginalize his study.

AMYGOODMAN: What was Blair’s interest, the prime minister at the time, in negating, in going after the scientist, in genetically modified food?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: The United States had been the primary country that’s promoting biotechnology and trying to transfer it all over the world. So, the Clinton administration was very high on biotechnology. It’s going to rejuvenate American high technology and create many jobs, etc., and be able to spread it throughout the world. Blair was very interested in getting biotechnology into Britain. So, the U.S. government and the British government were both very interested in pushing biotechnology. And, of course, in the background were the corporations who were politicking those two governments to make sure that biotechnology had an easy road to success.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to turn to another scientist. In 2012, French scientists carried out a study linking pesticide-treated, genetically modified corn with cancer in lab rats. The journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology initially published the report but later retracted it amidst controversy. The scientists stood by their findings, releasing a statement that read in part, quote, "Censorship of research into the risks of a technology so intertwined with global food safety undermines the value and credibility of science." Their article was republished this year in a different journal, Environmental Sciences Europe. I want to turn for a moment to the lead author on the study, Gilles-Éric Séralini. He recently told ME-TV what happened to the rats that were fed genetically modified corn and Roundup weed killer.

GILLES-ÉRIC SÉRALINI: Abnormalities in livers and kidneys, inflammations and pathologies, and we had also inversion of sexual hormones and also breast tumors.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s the scientist, Gilles-Éric Séralini. If you can, Professor Krimsky, explain further what he found.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, he found organ failure. First of all, he did one of the first long-term experiments. So, in other words, he did an experiment on the rats that lasted for a couple of years. Usually they would do a 90-day experiment on the animals. So this was a long-term experiment, which really was needed, because some of these effects you won’t see right away. And his results showed damage to organs, kidneys, and also proliferation of tumors at a much higher rate than the controls. And after his results came out, there was another surge of vilification of his work and his research and his reputation, on and on and on.

A few very unusual things happened. The first you mentioned, that his journal first supported him and said, "We have a very good refereed system, and he passed the referees," to get into this peer-reviewed journal. Within a year, however, they changed their mind, because of the political pressure that there was a solid journal, American U.S. journal, that said there were problems with one of the genetically modified products. So, the journal went ahead and retracted his article, without his permission.

And then they gave the reason for the retraction. And this is where a hundred scientists had signed a petition saying that the reasons they gave were not only unorthodox, they violated international standards. The reason they gave was very explicit. They said, "There is no fraud. There is no clear mistakes in this paper. The results were not definitive, and that’s why we’re retracting it." Now, if you use that criteria, you would have to retract 95 percent of all published work.

AMYGOODMAN: What does "definitive" mean?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, "definitive" means that it hasn’t resolved the controversy, that some people still believe that maybe he didn’t have enough rats. Maybe they would have changed the methodology slightly differently. There isn’t an experiment in toxicology that can be done which doesn’t have some shortcomings. Everybody knows that.

AMYGOODMAN: Or you reach a kind of critical mass in your studies indicating a trend; no one study actually proves it.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Exactly. There’s no single study that can absolutely definitively prove it, so you need follow-up studies to account for criticisms or larger numbers of animals, etc.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor Krimsky, can you explain what "the funding effect" is, a term you’ve coined with your colleagues?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Many years ago, we began looking at what happens to scientific research when it’s heavily funded by corporate interests. And we started by looking at drug research. And as a result of publishing a few papers, other people started doing these studies, and there is now a body of research in the drug industry which shows that corporate funding of research tends to produce the outcomes favorable to the financial interests of the corporation. That’s what we mean by "the funding effect." You have to show that the effect exists for any particular area. You can’t just assume it exists. So there are methods for showing that there is a funding effect. We’ve shown it in tobacco, we’ve shown it for drug research, in the best journals that we have, that have accepted these studies. And now people are beginning to look at it in other fields, like chemical toxins and GMOs.

AMYGOODMAN: How are other countries dealing with genetically modified foods?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, it’s interesting, because when you look at the studies that have been done that have negative outcomes—and I say I found 22 of them in the literature—they’re almost all done by European scientists. In order to do a study of a genetically modified plant seed in the United States, you have to have funding. Funding doesn’t come from the federal government, because the federal government has said, "We don’t need information about this." So the only funding that can produce these results is funding from corporations.

Secondly, you have to have permission from the company that manufactures the seeds to do this kind of research, to get the seeds, the special seeds that you need from the company. And they won’t release the seeds. So, people like Pusztai and Professor Séralini—well, Pusztai produced his own potato. Séralini had to get the seeds from some other source, not from the company. Pusztai could not get seeds from Monsanto. Monsanto signs—everyone who purchases seeds from Monsanto has to sign a contract with them. And one of the provisions of that contract is they cannot save their seeds, and they cannot deliver their seeds to some institute for study. In other words, Monsanto has complete control over the seeds, as well as other companies, so that it’s not even possible for researchers to do the work they need to do, unless they get permission from the companies.

AMYGOODMAN: How do you respond to the claim that GMOs will feed the world? Explain also the difference between genetically modified vegetables, plants—wait, can you respond to the claim that GMOs will feed the world, genetically modified organisms?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, this claim has been made by a number of people, but there’s no evidence for it. It may very well be that for a certain farm in a certain region, that a particular GMO might give them higher productivity in that particular area. But the world is filled with different regions of, you know, ecological regions, and seeds that work in one region do not necessarily work in another region. That’s what we call agroecology. We have to understand that you have to match the seed to the region, and not match the region to the seed. That’s why you don’t necessarily have high productivity in every region of the world. Some of the Indian farmers did not get high productivity with GMOs. And unfortunately, some of them committed suicide.

AMYGOODMAN: What do you mean?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: The Indian farmers had a high rate of suicide in the last few years, and that’s because many of them got into intense debt, and they couldn’t pay their debt. And in their mental capacity, they felt the only way to deal with this was to take their lives, unfortunately. Part of that debt was due to the fact that they were purchasing GMO seeds, which were at a higher rate than the seeds that they were originally purchasing.

AMYGOODMAN:Democracy Now! just traveled to Austria, and I was speaking to an Austrian farmer who was saying, "We recognized in our country, which is why we made it GMO-free," he said, "that you can’t have an organic farm next to a farm that’s growing genetically modified plants, because there is drift, and you can’t honestly have—say something is organic if you’re right nearby something that isn’t."

SHELDONKRIMSKY: That’s correct. And the pollen flows can flow quite a distance, a number of kilometers, so that in the United States, if you have an organic farm, there’s no protections for that organic farmer from the drift of pollen from another farm.

AMYGOODMAN: In fact, hasn’t Monsanto famously sued farmers, saying that they stole their genetically modified seeds, when in fact they drifted onto their property?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: As far as we know, the evidence suggests that the Canadian farmer that had the genetically modified plants didn’t—

AMYGOODMAN: This is Percy Schmeiser?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Yes, Schmeiser. As far as we know, evidence that I have is that he did not plant those seeds, that those seeds had drifted into his farm. And Monsanto sued him for intellectual property theft. And in some bizarre ruling of the Canadian court, Monsanto won. But the penalty was very, very low, like a dollar or something like that. So, Monsanto won, but Schmeiser didn’t have to pay a severe penalty.

AMYGOODMAN: Earlier this year, Vermont became the first state to approve GMO labeling with the passage of HB 112. The legality of the decision is now being challenged by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and other national organizations, which have come together to file a lawsuit in federal court. The Grocery Manufacturers Association put out a statement that read in part, quote, "Consumers who prefer to avoid GM ingredients have the option to choose from an array of products already in the marketplace labeled 'certified organic.' The government therefore has no compelling interest in warning consumers about foods containing GM ingredients, making HB 112’s legality suspect at best." Your response to this, Professor Krimsky?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, it is true that right now, under government standards, if a product is classified as organic—and there are criteria for that, including non-GMO—that there is some level of confidence that they won’t contain GMO products. But organic costs a lot of money. So there might be food companies that want to put out food that wouldn’t be classified as organic, but would be classified as non-GMO. Just like there are plastic companies that want to put out their plastics and say, "We don’t contain bisphenol A in our plastics," because there’s been a lot of evidence that it might be harmful, and therefore consumers have the right to buy something that says, "No bisphenol A in this substance," they should have the right to buy some food products that say, you know, "No GMOs," even though they’re not classified as organic, because the prices might be quite different.

AMYGOODMAN: Backers of GMOs cite the success of genetically modified papaya in Hawaii. It was designed to resist a virus that was killing off the fruit crop. It’s the only commercially grown GMO fruit in the United States. According to The New York Times, "after an outbreak of Papaya ringspot virus in the mid-’90s, only the Rainbow, endowed with a gene from the virus itself that effectively gave it immunity, had saved the crop." Your response to that, Professor Krimsky?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: You know, one of the issues about biotechnology is that they try to put into the crop a pesticidal property. And in theory, you know, one might think that this would be terrific. You include the pesticide or the herbicide-resistant/tolerant into the crop. But nature has its own way of adapting. So if you put in herbicide-resistant into the crop, eventually the weeds will get resistant to the herbicide that you use. And that’s in fact what’s happening with glyphosate, which is the most widely used herbicide now in the United States. So, they have plants which are glyphosate-resistant, so you can spray all the herbicide on your plant; it’ll kill everything else. But the weeds have adapted to it. So now they need a next generation of herbicide in the plant. So, the whole theory that you can introduce into the plants some magical protein that is going to be sustainable is just not a viable theory.

AMYGOODMAN: Are you referring to the superweeds that are growing throughout the West?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: The superweeds, exactly. And now the farmers are saying, "Hey, we bought into this glyphosate resistance, and now we’re getting these weeds that are in fact resistant to the glyphosate." And now they’re introducing a second generation. And one of the products that they’re trying to introduce is 2,4-D, which was used in the Vietnam War as part of the herbicides, defoliants.

AMYGOODMAN: You’re talking about Agent Orange. So—

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Yes, it was part of the Agent Orange mix. And I have to say, Rachel Carson cited 2,4-D as a suspect chemical in her 1962 classic book, Silent Spring.

AMYGOODMAN: Considered the mother of the modern environmental movement, she would later die of cancer herself.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Yes, yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, the significance of the ballot initiatives in Colorado and Oregon? In California and Washington state, genetically modified labeling bills failed.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: Is there anything different about Colorado and Oregon right now?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Colorado is always different. It’s a very single-minded, independent state that pushed the boundaries beyond belief in terms of, you know, legislation on marijuana, etc. If any state can do it, they have a very high consciousness for environmental issues. And if they do do it, I think it’ll cascade to other states, because I think the fear that the prices will skyrocket is just a scare tactic, it’s not real. We have companies that issue milk that say, "No bovine growth hormone used to make this milk," and it hasn’t skyrocketed the price of milk. So—

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Yeah. You know, the corporations don’t want a patchwork of regulations. I could understand that. They always would rather have one regulation that applies to everyone. And so, from their standpoint, they don’t want to have to make an adjustment to Colorado and an adjustment to this other state. But that doesn’t—

AMYGOODMAN: Well, they wouldn’t have to make an adjustment. If it was passed in Colorado and Oregon, they could just identify genetically modified foods all over the country.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: That’s correct. That’s correct.

AMYGOODMAN: You know, so goes Oregon and Colorado, so goes the nation.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: And that’s exactly what happens when California passes as an initiative on a toxic chemical. The companies just list it on the product, and every state, every community, has access to that information. It’s just a question of open information, which is really supposed to be at the groundwork of American capitalism. Keep the information open.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much, Professor Sheldon Krimsky, editor and author of The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know About the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk. You can read an introduction on our website at democracynow.org. Professor Krimsky teaches urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well, adjunct professor at the Tufts School of Medicine. Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

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Fri, 31 Oct 2014 14:40:00 -0400"The GMO Deception": Sheldon Krimsky on How BigAg & the Government Is Putting Your Food at Risk Watch part 2 of our conversation with Sheldon Krimsky, editor of The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . He is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. Professor Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.
Click here to watch part 1 of this interview.
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. Seventy-five percent of processed foods on supermarket shelves in the United States—from cracker, to soda, to soup—contain genetically engineered ingredients. Public concern has been steadily intensifying. The Vermont Legislature has passed a GMO labeling law, and now voters in Colorado and Oregon are voting on GMA labeling ballot initiatives.
Sheldon Krimsky is with us today, the editor and author of several contributions in the new book, The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . He is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. Professor Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.
Welcome to Democracy Now! for part two of our conversation. Now, you tell a remarkable story about the scientists who get destroyed as they attempt to look at GMO foods. But before we do, what is the problem with genetically modified foods? Why in the United States are 75 percent of our foods have ingredients that are genetically modified, but in Europe, in state after state, it&#8217;s completely outlawed? Why the difference?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The Europeans operate on the precautionary principle. They say, if you introduce a new product on the market, you should evaluate it before the consumers get a chance to purchase it. In America, we made a decision that genetically modified foods are safe before you even have to test it. So the government never required tests for GMOs in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN : Who made that decision?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, that decision was made by a commission, first of all, in the United States headed by Dan Quayle, and then it was—
AMY GOODMAN : The vice president under President Bush.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, yes, that&#8217;s correct. And by the 1990s, the decision was made how to divide the regulatory authority over genetically modified organisms—plants, animals, etc. And there were three agencies. The EPA would deal with environmental effects. USDA would be dealing with how it affects agriculture. And the FDA would be addressing the questions of human health.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, why are you concerned?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, because we have some evidence that animal studies can produce adverse effects when fed GMOs. There have been many studies. Many of them have said there&#8217;s no effects. But a few of them—I found 22 studies.
AMY GOODMAN : Give an example of one of these studies.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, one of these studies was published in one of the most important journals in international journals. It&#8217;s called The Lancet . It started publishing—
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s the British medical journal.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The British medical journal. It&#8217;s among the most prestigious journals in the world. And that was published in 1999 by a scientist who lived in Britain for 50 years—originally he was born in Hungary—Árpád Pusztai. And he was a researcher at the Rowett Institute. And he published a study which showed that his animals were harmed when fed a genetically modified potato.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to this scientist, to the biochemist, the nutritionist, Árpád Pusztai, world authority, as you said, actually on plant lectins, authoring some 270 papers, three books on the topic. In 1998, the scientist published research that showed feeding genetically modified potatoes to rats caused harm to their stomach lining and immune system. This led to a backlash against Dr. Pusztai and his subsequent suspension from his academic home, the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland. Let&#8217;s turn to a clip of Pusztai explaining the experiment he did using these genetically modified potatoes, the experiment that unleashed such a firestorm of criticism.
ÁRPÁD PUSZTAI : What we did was that, first, we took the genetically modified potatoes and put as much as possible of this into the diet, and we fed rats on it for a short time, 10 days. That&#8217;s an appropriate time in most of the nutritional studies as a sort of preliminary, short-term study. And we found that there were some problems. And then we said, &quot;Oh, but it is—is it possible that if we dilute it with a good protein, a non-GM protein, would these problems disappear? Would you dilute them out? So when we did that, we found that, no, it didn&#8217;t. The problems persisted, and particularly the problems affecting the gastrointestinal tract of the rats.
The problems were that the genetically modified potatoes induced what we call a proliferative growth in the small intestine. And I shall explain what it means. But before I do that, the most important thing was that we pre-selected the gene that its product should not do that. So, we spent six-and-a-half years of selecting out a gene whose product wouldn&#8217;t do the thing which we did see in the genetically modified potatoes.
AMY GOODMAN : So, Professor Sheldon Krimsky, that&#8217;s Árpád Pusztai.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain further what exactly he&#8217;s saying. Now, he was actually not critical of these genetically modified potatoes that he fed to rats, right?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : That&#8217;s correct. And his institute had a patent on those potatoes. I mean, after all, if you can produce a potato that would be resistant to insects, then you&#8217;d save money on pesticides, and you might be able to, you know, have a product that would be worthy of pesticidal properties. So he took protein from a flower, a snowdrop flower. And that protein—the genetics for that protein was put into the potato. But he honestly believed that he would have a safe outcome. He had already done an experiment with genetically modified peas, which did not show adverse effects on animals. And he felt that—the protein that he used, he fed to the animals when it wasn&#8217;t in the potato, so he felt the protein from the plant was going to be safe. And then he put it into the genetically modified potato, and then he fed it to the animals when it was embedded into the potato. And that&#8217;s when it caused the effects.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain again the effects.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, the effects he found were effects of the stomach lining of the animals, that there were proliferative growths in the stomach lining and other abnormalities in the intestines of the animals.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain then—so he did this scientific experiment. That&#8217;s what he found. It&#8217;s published in this very prestigious journal, Lancet .
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : So what happened to him, Dr. Pusztai?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, first of all, he published in Lancet in 1999. And prior to that, 1995, Scotland had put out a request for scientific studies to evaluate genetically modified food. So he put in one of those requests. At the time, he was the project director of eight projects. He was very well respected and had written a number of books on these lectins, which are insecticidal proteins. The plants themselves have proteins that resist insects. That&#8217;s how they survived all those years. So, his project was accepted by the council in Scotland, and then he did the research for it. So it was already reviewed before it was accepted for funding. And he got 1.3 million pounds to do the study. That&#8217;s where it began.
Prior to publishing his study in The Lancet , he was asked to appear on television. And he&#8217;s not a political—you know, he&#8217;s not a politicized scientist. He was naive. He went on television, with the approval of the director of the Rowett Institute. And the Rowett Institute, for one day, was very excited, because they got publicity being on TV with his research. The day after, all of a sudden, all of the phone calls started coming into the Rowett Institute, political phone calls from politicians—Tony Blair&#8217;s office, etc. And then, within a day, he was dismissed from his position. Within a day, this man who had been working there for decades and had such a prominent position, all of a sudden, lost his entire position.
AMY GOODMAN : Dismissed on what grounds?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : He did not have tenure, the way we do in universities—dismissed because they felt—they believed his research was not good. At least that&#8217;s what they said. What they didn&#8217;t say was that there were political pressures on the institute to devalue and diminish and marginalize his study.
AMY GOODMAN : What was Blair&#8217;s interest, the prime minister at the time, in negating, in going after the scientist, in genetically modified food?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The United States had been the primary country that&#8217;s promoting biotechnology and trying to transfer it all over the world. So, the Clinton administration was very high on biotechnology. It&#8217;s going to rejuvenate American high technology and create many jobs, etc., and be able to spread it throughout the world. Blair was very interested in getting biotechnology into Britain. So, the U.S. government and the British government were both very interested in pushing biotechnology. And, of course, in the background were the corporations who were politicking those two governments to make sure that biotechnology had an easy road to success.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to turn to another scientist. In 2012, French scientists carried out a study linking pesticide-treated, genetically modified corn with cancer in lab rats. The journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology initially published the report but later retracted it amidst controversy. The scientists stood by their findings, releasing a statement that read in part, quote, &quot;Censorship of research into the risks of a technology so intertwined with global food safety undermines the value and credibility of science.&quot; Their article was republished this year in a different journal, Environmental Sciences Europe . I want to turn for a moment to the lead author on the study, Gilles-Éric Séralini. He recently told ME-TV what happened to the rats that were fed genetically modified corn and Roundup weed killer.
GILLES -ÉRIC SÉRALINI: Abnormalities in livers and kidneys, inflammations and pathologies, and we had also inversion of sexual hormones and also breast tumors.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s the scientist, Gilles-Éric Séralini. If you can, Professor Krimsky, explain further what he found.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, he found organ failure. First of all, he did one of the first long-term experiments. So, in other words, he did an experiment on the rats that lasted for a couple of years. Usually they would do a 90-day experiment on the animals. So this was a long-term experiment, which really was needed, because some of these effects you won&#8217;t see right away. And his results showed damage to organs, kidneys, and also proliferation of tumors at a much higher rate than the controls. And after his results came out, there was another surge of vilification of his work and his research and his reputation, on and on and on.
A few very unusual things happened. The first you mentioned, that his journal first supported him and said, &quot;We have a very good refereed system, and he passed the referees,&quot; to get into this peer-reviewed journal. Within a year, however, they changed their mind, because of the political pressure that there was a solid journal, American U.S. journal, that said there were problems with one of the genetically modified products. So, the journal went ahead and retracted his article, without his permission.
And then they gave the reason for the retraction. And this is where a hundred scientists had signed a petition saying that the reasons they gave were not only unorthodox, they violated international standards. The reason they gave was very explicit. They said, &quot;There is no fraud. There is no clear mistakes in this paper. The results were not definitive, and that&#8217;s why we&#8217;re retracting it.&quot; Now, if you use that criteria, you would have to retract 95 percent of all published work.
AMY GOODMAN : What does &quot;definitive&quot; mean?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, &quot;definitive&quot; means that it hasn&#8217;t resolved the controversy, that some people still believe that maybe he didn&#8217;t have enough rats. Maybe they would have changed the methodology slightly differently. There isn&#8217;t an experiment in toxicology that can be done which doesn&#8217;t have some shortcomings. Everybody knows that.
AMY GOODMAN : Or you reach a kind of critical mass in your studies indicating a trend; no one study actually proves it.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Exactly. There&#8217;s no single study that can absolutely definitively prove it, so you need follow-up studies to account for criticisms or larger numbers of animals, etc.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor Krimsky, can you explain what &quot;the funding effect&quot; is, a term you&#8217;ve coined with your colleagues?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Many years ago, we began looking at what happens to scientific research when it&#8217;s heavily funded by corporate interests. And we started by looking at drug research. And as a result of publishing a few papers, other people started doing these studies, and there is now a body of research in the drug industry which shows that corporate funding of research tends to produce the outcomes favorable to the financial interests of the corporation. That&#8217;s what we mean by &quot;the funding effect.&quot; You have to show that the effect exists for any particular area. You can&#8217;t just assume it exists. So there are methods for showing that there is a funding effect. We&#8217;ve shown it in tobacco, we&#8217;ve shown it for drug research, in the best journals that we have, that have accepted these studies. And now people are beginning to look at it in other fields, like chemical toxins and GMOs.
AMY GOODMAN : How are other countries dealing with genetically modified foods?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, it&#8217;s interesting, because when you look at the studies that have been done that have negative outcomes—and I say I found 22 of them in the literature—they&#8217;re almost all done by European scientists. In order to do a study of a genetically modified plant seed in the United States, you have to have funding. Funding doesn&#8217;t come from the federal government, because the federal government has said, &quot;We don&#8217;t need information about this.&quot; So the only funding that can produce these results is funding from corporations.
Secondly, you have to have permission from the company that manufactures the seeds to do this kind of research, to get the seeds, the special seeds that you need from the company. And they won&#8217;t release the seeds. So, people like Pusztai and Professor Séralini—well, Pusztai produced his own potato. Séralini had to get the seeds from some other source, not from the company. Pusztai could not get seeds from Monsanto. Monsanto signs—everyone who purchases seeds from Monsanto has to sign a contract with them. And one of the provisions of that contract is they cannot save their seeds, and they cannot deliver their seeds to some institute for study. In other words, Monsanto has complete control over the seeds, as well as other companies, so that it&#8217;s not even possible for researchers to do the work they need to do, unless they get permission from the companies.
AMY GOODMAN : How do you respond to the claim that GMOs will feed the world? Explain also the difference between genetically modified vegetables, plants—wait, can you respond to the claim that GMOs will feed the world, genetically modified organisms?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, this claim has been made by a number of people, but there&#8217;s no evidence for it. It may very well be that for a certain farm in a certain region, that a particular GMO might give them higher productivity in that particular area. But the world is filled with different regions of, you know, ecological regions, and seeds that work in one region do not necessarily work in another region. That&#8217;s what we call agroecology. We have to understand that you have to match the seed to the region, and not match the region to the seed. That&#8217;s why you don&#8217;t necessarily have high productivity in every region of the world. Some of the Indian farmers did not get high productivity with GMOs. And unfortunately, some of them committed suicide.
AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The Indian farmers had a high rate of suicide in the last few years, and that&#8217;s because many of them got into intense debt, and they couldn&#8217;t pay their debt. And in their mental capacity, they felt the only way to deal with this was to take their lives, unfortunately. Part of that debt was due to the fact that they were purchasing GMO seeds, which were at a higher rate than the seeds that they were originally purchasing.
AMY GOODMAN : Democracy Now! just traveled to Austria, and I was speaking to an Austrian farmer who was saying, &quot;We recognized in our country, which is why we made it GMO -free,&quot; he said, &quot;that you can&#8217;t have an organic farm next to a farm that&#8217;s growing genetically modified plants, because there is drift, and you can&#8217;t honestly have—say something is organic if you&#8217;re right nearby something that isn&#8217;t.&quot;
SHELDON KRIMSKY : That&#8217;s correct. And the pollen flows can flow quite a distance, a number of kilometers, so that in the United States, if you have an organic farm, there&#8217;s no protections for that organic farmer from the drift of pollen from another farm.
AMY GOODMAN : In fact, hasn&#8217;t Monsanto famously sued farmers, saying that they stole their genetically modified seeds, when in fact they drifted onto their property?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : As far as we know, the evidence suggests that the Canadian farmer that had the genetically modified plants didn&#8217;t—
AMY GOODMAN : This is Percy Schmeiser?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, Schmeiser. As far as we know, evidence that I have is that he did not plant those seeds, that those seeds had drifted into his farm. And Monsanto sued him for intellectual property theft. And in some bizarre ruling of the Canadian court, Monsanto won. But the penalty was very, very low, like a dollar or something like that. So, Monsanto won, but Schmeiser didn&#8217;t have to pay a severe penalty.
AMY GOODMAN : Earlier this year, Vermont became the first state to approve GMO labeling with the passage of HB 112. The legality of the decision is now being challenged by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and other national organizations, which have come together to file a lawsuit in federal court. The Grocery Manufacturers Association put out a statement that read in part, quote, &quot;Consumers who prefer to avoid GM ingredients have the option to choose from an array of products already in the marketplace labeled &#39;certified organic.&#39; The government therefore has no compelling interest in warning consumers about foods containing GM ingredients, making HB 112&#8217;s legality suspect at best.&quot; Your response to this, Professor Krimsky?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, it is true that right now, under government standards, if a product is classified as organic—and there are criteria for that, including non-GMO—that there is some level of confidence that they won&#8217;t contain GMO products. But organic costs a lot of money. So there might be food companies that want to put out food that wouldn&#8217;t be classified as organic, but would be classified as non- GMO . Just like there are plastic companies that want to put out their plastics and say, &quot;We don&#8217;t contain bisphenol A in our plastics,&quot; because there&#8217;s been a lot of evidence that it might be harmful, and therefore consumers have the right to buy something that says, &quot;No bisphenol A in this substance,&quot; they should have the right to buy some food products that say, you know, &quot;No GMOs,&quot; even though they&#8217;re not classified as organic, because the prices might be quite different.
AMY GOODMAN : Backers of GMOs cite the success of genetically modified papaya in Hawaii. It was designed to resist a virus that was killing off the fruit crop. It&#8217;s the only commercially grown GMO fruit in the United States. According to The New York Times , &quot;after an outbreak of Papaya ringspot virus in the mid-’90s, only the Rainbow, endowed with a gene from the virus itself that effectively gave it immunity, had saved the crop.&quot; Your response to that, Professor Krimsky?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : You know, one of the issues about biotechnology is that they try to put into the crop a pesticidal property. And in theory, you know, one might think that this would be terrific. You include the pesticide or the herbicide-resistant/tolerant into the crop. But nature has its own way of adapting. So if you put in herbicide-resistant into the crop, eventually the weeds will get resistant to the herbicide that you use. And that&#8217;s in fact what&#8217;s happening with glyphosate, which is the most widely used herbicide now in the United States. So, they have plants which are glyphosate-resistant, so you can spray all the herbicide on your plant; it&#8217;ll kill everything else. But the weeds have adapted to it. So now they need a next generation of herbicide in the plant. So, the whole theory that you can introduce into the plants some magical protein that is going to be sustainable is just not a viable theory.
AMY GOODMAN : Are you referring to the superweeds that are growing throughout the West?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The superweeds, exactly. And now the farmers are saying, &quot;Hey, we bought into this glyphosate resistance, and now we&#8217;re getting these weeds that are in fact resistant to the glyphosate.&quot; And now they&#8217;re introducing a second generation. And one of the products that they&#8217;re trying to introduce is 2,4-D, which was used in the Vietnam War as part of the herbicides, defoliants.
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;re talking about Agent Orange. So—
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, it was part of the Agent Orange mix. And I have to say, Rachel Carson cited 2,4-D as a suspect chemical in her 1962 classic book, Silent Spring .
AMY GOODMAN : Considered the mother of the modern environmental movement, she would later die of cancer herself.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, the significance of the ballot initiatives in Colorado and Oregon? In California and Washington state, genetically modified labeling bills failed.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Is there anything different about Colorado and Oregon right now?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Colorado is always different. It&#8217;s a very single-minded, independent state that pushed the boundaries beyond belief in terms of, you know, legislation on marijuana, etc. If any state can do it, they have a very high consciousness for environmental issues. And if they do do it, I think it&#8217;ll cascade to other states, because I think the fear that the prices will skyrocket is just a scare tactic, it&#8217;s not real. We have companies that issue milk that say, &quot;No bovine growth hormone used to make this milk,&quot; and it hasn&#8217;t skyrocketed the price of milk. So—
AMY GOODMAN : It&#8217;s interesting that Ben &amp; Jerry&#8217;s and the Denver-based Chipotle company, the chain, food chain Chipotle—
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —have actually come out in support of GMO labeling, whereas you&#8217;ve got Pepsi and Kraft Foods and, well, most importantly, Monsanto pouring millions into the anti-labeling movement.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yeah. You know, the corporations don&#8217;t want a patchwork of regulations. I could understand that. They always would rather have one regulation that applies to everyone. And so, from their standpoint, they don&#8217;t want to have to make an adjustment to Colorado and an adjustment to this other state. But that doesn&#8217;t—
AMY GOODMAN : Well, they wouldn&#8217;t have to make an adjustment. If it was passed in Colorado and Oregon, they could just identify genetically modified foods all over the country.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : That&#8217;s correct. That&#8217;s correct.
AMY GOODMAN : You know, so goes Oregon and Colorado, so goes the nation.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : And that&#8217;s exactly what happens when California passes as an initiative on a toxic chemical. The companies just list it on the product, and every state, every community, has access to that information. It&#8217;s just a question of open information, which is really supposed to be at the groundwork of American capitalism. Keep the information open.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you very much, Professor Sheldon Krimsky, editor and author of The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know About the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . You can read an introduction on our website at democracynow.org. Professor Krimsky teaches urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well, adjunct professor at the Tufts School of Medicine. Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics. This is Democracy Now! I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!News"The GMO Deception": Sheldon Krimsky on How BigAg & the Government Is Putting Your Food at Risk Watch part 2 of our conversation with Sheldon Krimsky, editor of The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . He is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. Professor Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.
Click here to watch part 1 of this interview.
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. Seventy-five percent of processed foods on supermarket shelves in the United States—from cracker, to soda, to soup—contain genetically engineered ingredients. Public concern has been steadily intensifying. The Vermont Legislature has passed a GMO labeling law, and now voters in Colorado and Oregon are voting on GMA labeling ballot initiatives.
Sheldon Krimsky is with us today, the editor and author of several contributions in the new book, The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . He is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. Professor Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.
Welcome to Democracy Now! for part two of our conversation. Now, you tell a remarkable story about the scientists who get destroyed as they attempt to look at GMO foods. But before we do, what is the problem with genetically modified foods? Why in the United States are 75 percent of our foods have ingredients that are genetically modified, but in Europe, in state after state, it&#8217;s completely outlawed? Why the difference?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The Europeans operate on the precautionary principle. They say, if you introduce a new product on the market, you should evaluate it before the consumers get a chance to purchase it. In America, we made a decision that genetically modified foods are safe before you even have to test it. So the government never required tests for GMOs in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN : Who made that decision?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, that decision was made by a commission, first of all, in the United States headed by Dan Quayle, and then it was—
AMY GOODMAN : The vice president under President Bush.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, yes, that&#8217;s correct. And by the 1990s, the decision was made how to divide the regulatory authority over genetically modified organisms—plants, animals, etc. And there were three agencies. The EPA would deal with environmental effects. USDA would be dealing with how it affects agriculture. And the FDA would be addressing the questions of human health.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, why are you concerned?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, because we have some evidence that animal studies can produce adverse effects when fed GMOs. There have been many studies. Many of them have said there&#8217;s no effects. But a few of them—I found 22 studies.
AMY GOODMAN : Give an example of one of these studies.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, one of these studies was published in one of the most important journals in international journals. It&#8217;s called The Lancet . It started publishing—
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s the British medical journal.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The British medical journal. It&#8217;s among the most prestigious journals in the world. And that was published in 1999 by a scientist who lived in Britain for 50 years—originally he was born in Hungary—Árpád Pusztai. And he was a researcher at the Rowett Institute. And he published a study which showed that his animals were harmed when fed a genetically modified potato.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to this scientist, to the biochemist, the nutritionist, Árpád Pusztai, world authority, as you said, actually on plant lectins, authoring some 270 papers, three books on the topic. In 1998, the scientist published research that showed feeding genetically modified potatoes to rats caused harm to their stomach lining and immune system. This led to a backlash against Dr. Pusztai and his subsequent suspension from his academic home, the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland. Let&#8217;s turn to a clip of Pusztai explaining the experiment he did using these genetically modified potatoes, the experiment that unleashed such a firestorm of criticism.
ÁRPÁD PUSZTAI : What we did was that, first, we took the genetically modified potatoes and put as much as possible of this into the diet, and we fed rats on it for a short time, 10 days. That&#8217;s an appropriate time in most of the nutritional studies as a sort of preliminary, short-term study. And we found that there were some problems. And then we said, &quot;Oh, but it is—is it possible that if we dilute it with a good protein, a non-GM protein, would these problems disappear? Would you dilute them out? So when we did that, we found that, no, it didn&#8217;t. The problems persisted, and particularly the problems affecting the gastrointestinal tract of the rats.
The problems were that the genetically modified potatoes induced what we call a proliferative growth in the small intestine. And I shall explain what it means. But before I do that, the most important thing was that we pre-selected the gene that its product should not do that. So, we spent six-and-a-half years of selecting out a gene whose product wouldn&#8217;t do the thing which we did see in the genetically modified potatoes.
AMY GOODMAN : So, Professor Sheldon Krimsky, that&#8217;s Árpád Pusztai.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain further what exactly he&#8217;s saying. Now, he was actually not critical of these genetically modified potatoes that he fed to rats, right?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : That&#8217;s correct. And his institute had a patent on those potatoes. I mean, after all, if you can produce a potato that would be resistant to insects, then you&#8217;d save money on pesticides, and you might be able to, you know, have a product that would be worthy of pesticidal properties. So he took protein from a flower, a snowdrop flower. And that protein—the genetics for that protein was put into the potato. But he honestly believed that he would have a safe outcome. He had already done an experiment with genetically modified peas, which did not show adverse effects on animals. And he felt that—the protein that he used, he fed to the animals when it wasn&#8217;t in the potato, so he felt the protein from the plant was going to be safe. And then he put it into the genetically modified potato, and then he fed it to the animals when it was embedded into the potato. And that&#8217;s when it caused the effects.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain again the effects.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, the effects he found were effects of the stomach lining of the animals, that there were proliferative growths in the stomach lining and other abnormalities in the intestines of the animals.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain then—so he did this scientific experiment. That&#8217;s what he found. It&#8217;s published in this very prestigious journal, Lancet .
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : So what happened to him, Dr. Pusztai?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, first of all, he published in Lancet in 1999. And prior to that, 1995, Scotland had put out a request for scientific studies to evaluate genetically modified food. So he put in one of those requests. At the time, he was the project director of eight projects. He was very well respected and had written a number of books on these lectins, which are insecticidal proteins. The plants themselves have proteins that resist insects. That&#8217;s how they survived all those years. So, his project was accepted by the council in Scotland, and then he did the research for it. So it was already reviewed before it was accepted for funding. And he got 1.3 million pounds to do the study. That&#8217;s where it began.
Prior to publishing his study in The Lancet , he was asked to appear on television. And he&#8217;s not a political—you know, he&#8217;s not a politicized scientist. He was naive. He went on television, with the approval of the director of the Rowett Institute. And the Rowett Institute, for one day, was very excited, because they got publicity being on TV with his research. The day after, all of a sudden, all of the phone calls started coming into the Rowett Institute, political phone calls from politicians—Tony Blair&#8217;s office, etc. And then, within a day, he was dismissed from his position. Within a day, this man who had been working there for decades and had such a prominent position, all of a sudden, lost his entire position.
AMY GOODMAN : Dismissed on what grounds?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : He did not have tenure, the way we do in universities—dismissed because they felt—they believed his research was not good. At least that&#8217;s what they said. What they didn&#8217;t say was that there were political pressures on the institute to devalue and diminish and marginalize his study.
AMY GOODMAN : What was Blair&#8217;s interest, the prime minister at the time, in negating, in going after the scientist, in genetically modified food?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The United States had been the primary country that&#8217;s promoting biotechnology and trying to transfer it all over the world. So, the Clinton administration was very high on biotechnology. It&#8217;s going to rejuvenate American high technology and create many jobs, etc., and be able to spread it throughout the world. Blair was very interested in getting biotechnology into Britain. So, the U.S. government and the British government were both very interested in pushing biotechnology. And, of course, in the background were the corporations who were politicking those two governments to make sure that biotechnology had an easy road to success.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to turn to another scientist. In 2012, French scientists carried out a study linking pesticide-treated, genetically modified corn with cancer in lab rats. The journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology initially published the report but later retracted it amidst controversy. The scientists stood by their findings, releasing a statement that read in part, quote, &quot;Censorship of research into the risks of a technology so intertwined with global food safety undermines the value and credibility of science.&quot; Their article was republished this year in a different journal, Environmental Sciences Europe . I want to turn for a moment to the lead author on the study, Gilles-Éric Séralini. He recently told ME-TV what happened to the rats that were fed genetically modified corn and Roundup weed killer.
GILLES -ÉRIC SÉRALINI: Abnormalities in livers and kidneys, inflammations and pathologies, and we had also inversion of sexual hormones and also breast tumors.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s the scientist, Gilles-Éric Séralini. If you can, Professor Krimsky, explain further what he found.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, he found organ failure. First of all, he did one of the first long-term experiments. So, in other words, he did an experiment on the rats that lasted for a couple of years. Usually they would do a 90-day experiment on the animals. So this was a long-term experiment, which really was needed, because some of these effects you won&#8217;t see right away. And his results showed damage to organs, kidneys, and also proliferation of tumors at a much higher rate than the controls. And after his results came out, there was another surge of vilification of his work and his research and his reputation, on and on and on.
A few very unusual things happened. The first you mentioned, that his journal first supported him and said, &quot;We have a very good refereed system, and he passed the referees,&quot; to get into this peer-reviewed journal. Within a year, however, they changed their mind, because of the political pressure that there was a solid journal, American U.S. journal, that said there were problems with one of the genetically modified products. So, the journal went ahead and retracted his article, without his permission.
And then they gave the reason for the retraction. And this is where a hundred scientists had signed a petition saying that the reasons they gave were not only unorthodox, they violated international standards. The reason they gave was very explicit. They said, &quot;There is no fraud. There is no clear mistakes in this paper. The results were not definitive, and that&#8217;s why we&#8217;re retracting it.&quot; Now, if you use that criteria, you would have to retract 95 percent of all published work.
AMY GOODMAN : What does &quot;definitive&quot; mean?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, &quot;definitive&quot; means that it hasn&#8217;t resolved the controversy, that some people still believe that maybe he didn&#8217;t have enough rats. Maybe they would have changed the methodology slightly differently. There isn&#8217;t an experiment in toxicology that can be done which doesn&#8217;t have some shortcomings. Everybody knows that.
AMY GOODMAN : Or you reach a kind of critical mass in your studies indicating a trend; no one study actually proves it.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Exactly. There&#8217;s no single study that can absolutely definitively prove it, so you need follow-up studies to account for criticisms or larger numbers of animals, etc.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor Krimsky, can you explain what &quot;the funding effect&quot; is, a term you&#8217;ve coined with your colleagues?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Many years ago, we began looking at what happens to scientific research when it&#8217;s heavily funded by corporate interests. And we started by looking at drug research. And as a result of publishing a few papers, other people started doing these studies, and there is now a body of research in the drug industry which shows that corporate funding of research tends to produce the outcomes favorable to the financial interests of the corporation. That&#8217;s what we mean by &quot;the funding effect.&quot; You have to show that the effect exists for any particular area. You can&#8217;t just assume it exists. So there are methods for showing that there is a funding effect. We&#8217;ve shown it in tobacco, we&#8217;ve shown it for drug research, in the best journals that we have, that have accepted these studies. And now people are beginning to look at it in other fields, like chemical toxins and GMOs.
AMY GOODMAN : How are other countries dealing with genetically modified foods?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, it&#8217;s interesting, because when you look at the studies that have been done that have negative outcomes—and I say I found 22 of them in the literature—they&#8217;re almost all done by European scientists. In order to do a study of a genetically modified plant seed in the United States, you have to have funding. Funding doesn&#8217;t come from the federal government, because the federal government has said, &quot;We don&#8217;t need information about this.&quot; So the only funding that can produce these results is funding from corporations.
Secondly, you have to have permission from the company that manufactures the seeds to do this kind of research, to get the seeds, the special seeds that you need from the company. And they won&#8217;t release the seeds. So, people like Pusztai and Professor Séralini—well, Pusztai produced his own potato. Séralini had to get the seeds from some other source, not from the company. Pusztai could not get seeds from Monsanto. Monsanto signs—everyone who purchases seeds from Monsanto has to sign a contract with them. And one of the provisions of that contract is they cannot save their seeds, and they cannot deliver their seeds to some institute for study. In other words, Monsanto has complete control over the seeds, as well as other companies, so that it&#8217;s not even possible for researchers to do the work they need to do, unless they get permission from the companies.
AMY GOODMAN : How do you respond to the claim that GMOs will feed the world? Explain also the difference between genetically modified vegetables, plants—wait, can you respond to the claim that GMOs will feed the world, genetically modified organisms?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, this claim has been made by a number of people, but there&#8217;s no evidence for it. It may very well be that for a certain farm in a certain region, that a particular GMO might give them higher productivity in that particular area. But the world is filled with different regions of, you know, ecological regions, and seeds that work in one region do not necessarily work in another region. That&#8217;s what we call agroecology. We have to understand that you have to match the seed to the region, and not match the region to the seed. That&#8217;s why you don&#8217;t necessarily have high productivity in every region of the world. Some of the Indian farmers did not get high productivity with GMOs. And unfortunately, some of them committed suicide.
AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The Indian farmers had a high rate of suicide in the last few years, and that&#8217;s because many of them got into intense debt, and they couldn&#8217;t pay their debt. And in their mental capacity, they felt the only way to deal with this was to take their lives, unfortunately. Part of that debt was due to the fact that they were purchasing GMO seeds, which were at a higher rate than the seeds that they were originally purchasing.
AMY GOODMAN : Democracy Now! just traveled to Austria, and I was speaking to an Austrian farmer who was saying, &quot;We recognized in our country, which is why we made it GMO -free,&quot; he said, &quot;that you can&#8217;t have an organic farm next to a farm that&#8217;s growing genetically modified plants, because there is drift, and you can&#8217;t honestly have—say something is organic if you&#8217;re right nearby something that isn&#8217;t.&quot;
SHELDON KRIMSKY : That&#8217;s correct. And the pollen flows can flow quite a distance, a number of kilometers, so that in the United States, if you have an organic farm, there&#8217;s no protections for that organic farmer from the drift of pollen from another farm.
AMY GOODMAN : In fact, hasn&#8217;t Monsanto famously sued farmers, saying that they stole their genetically modified seeds, when in fact they drifted onto their property?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : As far as we know, the evidence suggests that the Canadian farmer that had the genetically modified plants didn&#8217;t—
AMY GOODMAN : This is Percy Schmeiser?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, Schmeiser. As far as we know, evidence that I have is that he did not plant those seeds, that those seeds had drifted into his farm. And Monsanto sued him for intellectual property theft. And in some bizarre ruling of the Canadian court, Monsanto won. But the penalty was very, very low, like a dollar or something like that. So, Monsanto won, but Schmeiser didn&#8217;t have to pay a severe penalty.
AMY GOODMAN : Earlier this year, Vermont became the first state to approve GMO labeling with the passage of HB 112. The legality of the decision is now being challenged by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and other national organizations, which have come together to file a lawsuit in federal court. The Grocery Manufacturers Association put out a statement that read in part, quote, &quot;Consumers who prefer to avoid GM ingredients have the option to choose from an array of products already in the marketplace labeled &#39;certified organic.&#39; The government therefore has no compelling interest in warning consumers about foods containing GM ingredients, making HB 112&#8217;s legality suspect at best.&quot; Your response to this, Professor Krimsky?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, it is true that right now, under government standards, if a product is classified as organic—and there are criteria for that, including non-GMO—that there is some level of confidence that they won&#8217;t contain GMO products. But organic costs a lot of money. So there might be food companies that want to put out food that wouldn&#8217;t be classified as organic, but would be classified as non- GMO . Just like there are plastic companies that want to put out their plastics and say, &quot;We don&#8217;t contain bisphenol A in our plastics,&quot; because there&#8217;s been a lot of evidence that it might be harmful, and therefore consumers have the right to buy something that says, &quot;No bisphenol A in this substance,&quot; they should have the right to buy some food products that say, you know, &quot;No GMOs,&quot; even though they&#8217;re not classified as organic, because the prices might be quite different.
AMY GOODMAN : Backers of GMOs cite the success of genetically modified papaya in Hawaii. It was designed to resist a virus that was killing off the fruit crop. It&#8217;s the only commercially grown GMO fruit in the United States. According to The New York Times , &quot;after an outbreak of Papaya ringspot virus in the mid-’90s, only the Rainbow, endowed with a gene from the virus itself that effectively gave it immunity, had saved the crop.&quot; Your response to that, Professor Krimsky?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : You know, one of the issues about biotechnology is that they try to put into the crop a pesticidal property. And in theory, you know, one might think that this would be terrific. You include the pesticide or the herbicide-resistant/tolerant into the crop. But nature has its own way of adapting. So if you put in herbicide-resistant into the crop, eventually the weeds will get resistant to the herbicide that you use. And that&#8217;s in fact what&#8217;s happening with glyphosate, which is the most widely used herbicide now in the United States. So, they have plants which are glyphosate-resistant, so you can spray all the herbicide on your plant; it&#8217;ll kill everything else. But the weeds have adapted to it. So now they need a next generation of herbicide in the plant. So, the whole theory that you can introduce into the plants some magical protein that is going to be sustainable is just not a viable theory.
AMY GOODMAN : Are you referring to the superweeds that are growing throughout the West?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : The superweeds, exactly. And now the farmers are saying, &quot;Hey, we bought into this glyphosate resistance, and now we&#8217;re getting these weeds that are in fact resistant to the glyphosate.&quot; And now they&#8217;re introducing a second generation. And one of the products that they&#8217;re trying to introduce is 2,4-D, which was used in the Vietnam War as part of the herbicides, defoliants.
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;re talking about Agent Orange. So—
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, it was part of the Agent Orange mix. And I have to say, Rachel Carson cited 2,4-D as a suspect chemical in her 1962 classic book, Silent Spring .
AMY GOODMAN : Considered the mother of the modern environmental movement, she would later die of cancer herself.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, the significance of the ballot initiatives in Colorado and Oregon? In California and Washington state, genetically modified labeling bills failed.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Is there anything different about Colorado and Oregon right now?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Colorado is always different. It&#8217;s a very single-minded, independent state that pushed the boundaries beyond belief in terms of, you know, legislation on marijuana, etc. If any state can do it, they have a very high consciousness for environmental issues. And if they do do it, I think it&#8217;ll cascade to other states, because I think the fear that the prices will skyrocket is just a scare tactic, it&#8217;s not real. We have companies that issue milk that say, &quot;No bovine growth hormone used to make this milk,&quot; and it hasn&#8217;t skyrocketed the price of milk. So—
AMY GOODMAN : It&#8217;s interesting that Ben &amp; Jerry&#8217;s and the Denver-based Chipotle company, the chain, food chain Chipotle—
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —have actually come out in support of GMO labeling, whereas you&#8217;ve got Pepsi and Kraft Foods and, well, most importantly, Monsanto pouring millions into the anti-labeling movement.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Yeah. You know, the corporations don&#8217;t want a patchwork of regulations. I could understand that. They always would rather have one regulation that applies to everyone. And so, from their standpoint, they don&#8217;t want to have to make an adjustment to Colorado and an adjustment to this other state. But that doesn&#8217;t—
AMY GOODMAN : Well, they wouldn&#8217;t have to make an adjustment. If it was passed in Colorado and Oregon, they could just identify genetically modified foods all over the country.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : That&#8217;s correct. That&#8217;s correct.
AMY GOODMAN : You know, so goes Oregon and Colorado, so goes the nation.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : And that&#8217;s exactly what happens when California passes as an initiative on a toxic chemical. The companies just list it on the product, and every state, every community, has access to that information. It&#8217;s just a question of open information, which is really supposed to be at the groundwork of American capitalism. Keep the information open.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you very much, Professor Sheldon Krimsky, editor and author of The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know About the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . You can read an introduction on our website at democracynow.org. Professor Krimsky teaches urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well, adjunct professor at the Tufts School of Medicine. Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics. This is Democracy Now! I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsMonsanto, BigAg Spend Millions Fighting Colorado, Oregon Ballot Measures to Label GMO Foodshttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/28/monsanto_bigag_spend_millions_to_fight
tag:democracynow.org,2014-10-28:en/story/c4631a AARON MATÉ: Food fights are raging in Colorado and Oregon—that is, the fights over ballot initiatives that would require the labeling of genetically engineered food. On Election Day, voters will cast a &quot;yay&quot; or &quot;nay&quot; for Proposition 105 in Colorado and Measure 92 in Oregon. The states could become the first to mandate labeling laws for genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, possibly affecting industry labeling practices across the country. [Earlier this year, Vermont became the first state to approve GMO labeling through the legislative process, but the decision is now being challenged in the courts.] Numerous items are already sold in grocery stores containing GMO corn and soy, but companies are currently not required to inform consumers. Advocates of Prop 105 in Colorado say GMO foods can be harmful to human health due to pesticide residues and the altered crop genetics. Several celebrities have banded together to support the Right to Know campaign with this playfully ironic PSA that begins with actor Danny DeVito.
DANNY DEVITO : What makes you think you have the right to know?
JILLIAN MICHAELS : Who do you think you are?
BILL MAHER : You shouldn&#8217;t know whether your food is genetically modified.
JOHN CHO : You might do something dumb.
GLENN HOWERTON : Like you&#8217;d be looking at labels and making decisions.
DANNY DEVITO : Knowing if you&#8217;re eating or buying genetically engineered food is not your right.
KAITLIN OLSON : Ooh, maybe move to Europe or Japan if you want that right.
GLENN HOWERTON : Or a lot of countries where people have the right to know.
BILL MAHER : But not here, baby.
KADEE STRICKLAND : Unless you demand that GMOs get labeled.
GLENN HOWERTON : Vote, and you get to know what&#8217;s in your food.
UNIDENTIFIED : Vote yes for the right to know.
AMY GOODMAN : An ad by the Right to Know Colorado campaign. Opponents of Prop 105 say the effort to label genetically modified food is overly cumbersome and will spread misinformation. This ad was released by the No on 105 campaign.
DON AMENT : Agriculture is crucial to Colorado&#8217;s economy. Proposition 105 would hurt Colorado food producers by forcing them to use misleading labels that conflict with national standards. It would require many food products that we export to be labeled as genetically engineered, even when they&#8217;re not.
AARON MATÉ: That&#8217;s an ad by the No on 105 campaign. Leading corporations opposing the labeling measures include Monsanto, Kraft Foods, Pepsi, Kellogg and Coca-Cola. By some accounts, opponents of labeling have contributed roughly $20 million for campaigning against the proposed laws, nearly triple the money raised by supporters of the initiatives. In Oregon, the fight for GMO labeling has turned into the most expensive ballot measure campaign in the state&#8217;s history.
AMY GOODMAN : For more, we&#8217;re joined by Sheldon Krimsky, editor and author of several contributions in the new book, The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . He&#8217;s a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. Professor Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.
Sheldon Krimsky, welcome to Democracy Now!
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : So, I just flew back from Austria, which is GMO -free. And they&#8217;re very puzzled when they look at the United States. I mean, they are GMO -free. They don&#8217;t allow genetically modified foods to grow there. They&#8217;re puzzled when they look at the United States that we&#8217;re not talking about GMO -free country, we&#8217;re talking about labeling the foods that are genetically modified. You can be for GMOs and still support labeling for them.
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Right.
AMY GOODMAN : So, talk about the significance of these ballot initiatives. I mean, what&#8217;s going on in Colorado is a true battle, Monsanto and these other corporations pouring in millions. Now Chipotle has joined Ben &amp; Jerry&#8217;s and lot of environmental groups in saying that they want the labeling. Why do you think the labeling is such a problem? What is the problem with GMOs?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, I think we have to go back to the history of regulation in the United States. The Dan Quayle commission produced a position paper, basically, on how to regulate biotechnology. Out of that, they said that you don&#8217;t have to regulate genetically modified food. So, if you put a chemical into a processed food, you have to go through FDA regulations. But if you put a foreign gene into a plant, according to the FDA , you don&#8217;t have to go through regulations. They give the corporations the opportunity to decide whether they want to market the food or not. So when you start with that assumption, where they think and believe that putting foreign genes into food is no different than just creating hybrid crops, once you follow that logic, and they say there&#8217;s no need for labeling—Europeans have never followed that logic. They say you have to test each of these products, because you don&#8217;t know what the outcome is going to be.
AARON MATÉ: Your book makes the case that the science on GMOs has been corporatized, that companies like Monsanto have had such a huge influence over the research and the conclusions of scientists. How has that come to be, when, for example, on the issue of fossil fuels, we have a consensus of climate scientists that fossil fuel extraction causes global warming and needs to be stopped, even though that would be harmful to major companies? How is it that agribusiness has come to control the science, as you claim in your book?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, there are some independent scientists, and they have produced some animal studies on the effects of GMOs, and some of those studies have shown that the effects are not good. And every time a scientist produces such a study, they are vilified by other scientists and other people who are tied to the industry. So, we have seen from our own research that the science has been politicized, and there are many cases where we can show that scientists have been treated unfairly and unethically, just because they have found negative outcomes with respect to the animal studies.
AMY GOODMAN : While on the campaign trail in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to label GMO foods, if elected.
SEN . BARACK OBAMA : Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ll do as president: I&#8217;ll immediately implement country-of-origin labeling, because Americans should know where their food comes from. We&#8217;ll let folks know whether their food has been genetically modified, because Americans should know what they&#8217;re buying.
AMY GOODMAN : That was candidate Obama. What has President Obama done?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Nothing. On the biotechnology area, he has not taken any initiatives at all. The FDA has held pretty much to their original position that labeling is irrelevant for GMOs and that it would add no useful information to consumers. The fact is that, when polled, most consumers feel there should be labeling on GMOs to give them a choice. Everyone has the right to be a first user or a late user of a new product or technology. Remember Olestra, the artificial fat substance? Some people said, &quot;Oh, you know, I&#8217;ll just go for it.&quot; Other people said, &quot;Oh, no. Not me. I&#8217;m going to wait until several million people have tried it.&quot; And we don&#8217;t have that choice with GMOs unless we buy organic, because the government standard does say that organic foods are not supposed to have more than 1 percent GMOs in them. So that&#8217;s the only choice people have, and organic is usually more expensive.
AARON MATÉ: On top of labeling, what other measures would you want to see implemented around the issue of GMOs?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, for one thing, the Europeans have taken a position that these products have to be tested, that you cannot assume a priori that they&#8217;re going to be safe. The United States has taken exactly the opposite position, that they don&#8217;t have to be tested. We have evidence—in the least, I found 22 studies have shown that the animals that are fed GMOs have had some negative effects. We don&#8217;t know whether these 22 studies will stand up when they&#8217;re retried, but nobody can tell us that these studies in peer-reviewed journals are not important or relevant. And sometimes, the few negative studies that you have are more important than the dozens of positive studies, which show nothing. So, we have to take a very serious look at the studies that have been done which have shown that there are some negative effects.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about the major players in the ballot initiatives in Oregon and Colorado who are against labeling? For example, like Monsanto?
SHELDON KRIMSKY : Well, the large corporations don&#8217;t want to label, for obvious reasons. They don&#8217;t want to have segmented, patchwork communities where they have to present products to different states in different conditions. It doesn&#8217;t work well for the efficiency of a corporation. So, they would prefer to have one rule for every state and every city. Now, when California requires labeling on products because of environmental effects, those labels go to every other city and state in the country. So we all benefit from some of the California initiatives on toxic chemicals. And that could also be true with GMOs. If they label in Oregon, if they label in Colorado, they can just label everywhere. And the company is not going to lose out on that.
They&#8217;re trying to instill fear in the people that the food prices will skyrocket if they do that. Well, that&#8217;s just fear tactics. We have some labeling, voluntary labeling, on genetically modified products used to make milk, bovine growth hormones. You can buy milk that says, you know, &quot;no bovine growth hormone.&quot; It hasn&#8217;t skyrocketed the products of—the cost of milk.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, we have a chapter of your book online at democracynow.org. Sheldon Krimsky, editor and author of a number of contributions in the new book, The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know About the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . He is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. AARON MATÉ: Food fights are raging in Colorado and Oregon—that is, the fights over ballot initiatives that would require the labeling of genetically engineered food. On Election Day, voters will cast a "yay" or "nay" for Proposition 105 in Colorado and Measure 92 in Oregon. The states could become the first to mandate labeling laws for genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, possibly affecting industry labeling practices across the country. [Earlier this year, Vermont became the first state to approve GMO labeling through the legislative process, but the decision is now being challenged in the courts.] Numerous items are already sold in grocery stores containing GMO corn and soy, but companies are currently not required to inform consumers. Advocates of Prop 105 in Colorado say GMO foods can be harmful to human health due to pesticide residues and the altered crop genetics. Several celebrities have banded together to support the Right to Know campaign with this playfully ironic PSA that begins with actor Danny DeVito.

KAITLINOLSON: Ooh, maybe move to Europe or Japan if you want that right.

GLENNHOWERTON: Or a lot of countries where people have the right to know.

BILLMAHER: But not here, baby.

KADEESTRICKLAND: Unless you demand that GMOs get labeled.

GLENNHOWERTON: Vote, and you get to know what’s in your food.

UNIDENTIFIED: Vote yes for the right to know.

AMYGOODMAN: An ad by the Right to Know Colorado campaign. Opponents of Prop 105 say the effort to label genetically modified food is overly cumbersome and will spread misinformation. This ad was released by the No on 105 campaign.

DONAMENT: Agriculture is crucial to Colorado’s economy. Proposition 105 would hurt Colorado food producers by forcing them to use misleading labels that conflict with national standards. It would require many food products that we export to be labeled as genetically engineered, even when they’re not.

AARON MATÉ: That’s an ad by the No on 105 campaign. Leading corporations opposing the labeling measures include Monsanto, Kraft Foods, Pepsi, Kellogg and Coca-Cola. By some accounts, opponents of labeling have contributed roughly $20 million for campaigning against the proposed laws, nearly triple the money raised by supporters of the initiatives. In Oregon, the fight for GMO labeling has turned into the most expensive ballot measure campaign in the state’s history.

AMYGOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Sheldon Krimsky, editor and author of several contributions in the new book, The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk. He’s a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. Professor Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.

Sheldon Krimsky, welcome to Democracy Now!

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: So, I just flew back from Austria, which is GMO-free. And they’re very puzzled when they look at the United States. I mean, they are GMO-free. They don’t allow genetically modified foods to grow there. They’re puzzled when they look at the United States that we’re not talking about GMO-free country, we’re talking about labeling the foods that are genetically modified. You can be for GMOs and still support labeling for them.

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Right.

AMYGOODMAN: So, talk about the significance of these ballot initiatives. I mean, what’s going on in Colorado is a true battle, Monsanto and these other corporations pouring in millions. Now Chipotle has joined Ben & Jerry’s and lot of environmental groups in saying that they want the labeling. Why do you think the labeling is such a problem? What is the problem with GMOs?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, I think we have to go back to the history of regulation in the United States. The Dan Quayle commission produced a position paper, basically, on how to regulate biotechnology. Out of that, they said that you don’t have to regulate genetically modified food. So, if you put a chemical into a processed food, you have to go through FDA regulations. But if you put a foreign gene into a plant, according to the FDA, you don’t have to go through regulations. They give the corporations the opportunity to decide whether they want to market the food or not. So when you start with that assumption, where they think and believe that putting foreign genes into food is no different than just creating hybrid crops, once you follow that logic, and they say there’s no need for labeling—Europeans have never followed that logic. They say you have to test each of these products, because you don’t know what the outcome is going to be.

AARON MATÉ: Your book makes the case that the science on GMOs has been corporatized, that companies like Monsanto have had such a huge influence over the research and the conclusions of scientists. How has that come to be, when, for example, on the issue of fossil fuels, we have a consensus of climate scientists that fossil fuel extraction causes global warming and needs to be stopped, even though that would be harmful to major companies? How is it that agribusiness has come to control the science, as you claim in your book?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, there are some independent scientists, and they have produced some animal studies on the effects of GMOs, and some of those studies have shown that the effects are not good. And every time a scientist produces such a study, they are vilified by other scientists and other people who are tied to the industry. So, we have seen from our own research that the science has been politicized, and there are many cases where we can show that scientists have been treated unfairly and unethically, just because they have found negative outcomes with respect to the animal studies.

AMYGOODMAN: While on the campaign trail in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to label GMO foods, if elected.

SEN. BARACKOBAMA: Here’s what I’ll do as president: I’ll immediately implement country-of-origin labeling, because Americans should know where their food comes from. We’ll let folks know whether their food has been genetically modified, because Americans should know what they’re buying.

AMYGOODMAN: That was candidate Obama. What has President Obama done?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Nothing. On the biotechnology area, he has not taken any initiatives at all. The FDA has held pretty much to their original position that labeling is irrelevant for GMOs and that it would add no useful information to consumers. The fact is that, when polled, most consumers feel there should be labeling on GMOs to give them a choice. Everyone has the right to be a first user or a late user of a new product or technology. Remember Olestra, the artificial fat substance? Some people said, "Oh, you know, I’ll just go for it." Other people said, "Oh, no. Not me. I’m going to wait until several million people have tried it." And we don’t have that choice with GMOs unless we buy organic, because the government standard does say that organic foods are not supposed to have more than 1 percent GMOs in them. So that’s the only choice people have, and organic is usually more expensive.

AARON MATÉ: On top of labeling, what other measures would you want to see implemented around the issue of GMOs?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, for one thing, the Europeans have taken a position that these products have to be tested, that you cannot assume a priori that they’re going to be safe. The United States has taken exactly the opposite position, that they don’t have to be tested. We have evidence—in the least, I found 22 studies have shown that the animals that are fed GMOs have had some negative effects. We don’t know whether these 22 studies will stand up when they’re retried, but nobody can tell us that these studies in peer-reviewed journals are not important or relevant. And sometimes, the few negative studies that you have are more important than the dozens of positive studies, which show nothing. So, we have to take a very serious look at the studies that have been done which have shown that there are some negative effects.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the major players in the ballot initiatives in Oregon and Colorado who are against labeling? For example, like Monsanto?

SHELDONKRIMSKY: Well, the large corporations don’t want to label, for obvious reasons. They don’t want to have segmented, patchwork communities where they have to present products to different states in different conditions. It doesn’t work well for the efficiency of a corporation. So, they would prefer to have one rule for every state and every city. Now, when California requires labeling on products because of environmental effects, those labels go to every other city and state in the country. So we all benefit from some of the California initiatives on toxic chemicals. And that could also be true with GMOs. If they label in Oregon, if they label in Colorado, they can just label everywhere. And the company is not going to lose out on that.

They’re trying to instill fear in the people that the food prices will skyrocket if they do that. Well, that’s just fear tactics. We have some labeling, voluntary labeling, on genetically modified products used to make milk, bovine growth hormones. You can buy milk that says, you know, "no bovine growth hormone." It hasn’t skyrocketed the products of—the cost of milk.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we have a chapter of your book online at democracynow.org. Sheldon Krimsky, editor and author of a number of contributions in the new book, The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know About the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk. He is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, as well as adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine.

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Tue, 28 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0400READ: “GMO Deception” What You Need to Know about Corporations and Govt. Agencies Putting Us at Riskhttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/10/27/read_what_you_need_to_know
tag:democracynow.org,2014-10-27:blog/a7d3d7 As voters in Oregon and Colorado head to the polls next week to decide if they support labeling laws for genetically modified organisms, on Tuesday we will be joined by Sheldon Krimsky to discuss his new book, The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk . The book has a forward by Ralph Nader and is a compilation of thought-provoking essays by leading scientists, science writers and public health advocates who, in their writing, explore the social, environmental and moral consequences of GMOs. You can read the introduction below.
Sheldon Krimsky is professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at the Tufts School of Medicine. Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.
Excerpted with permission from The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber. Copyright 2014, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
INTRODUCTION &ndash;The Science and Regulation behind the GMO Deception
Agriculture had its origins about ten thousand years ago. Throughout most of that period farmers shared seeds, selected desired phenotypes of plants, and with keen observation and experience sought to understand the environmental factors affecting crop productivity. Through selective breeding, farmers chose plants that were best adapted to their region. By saving seeds of the more desired varieties they were able to achieve shortened growing seasons, larger fruits or vegetables, enhanced disease resistance and varieties with higher nutritional value. The birth of botany as a discipline can be traced to ancient Greece. Theophrastus of Eresos (371–287 BCE ), a student of Aristotle, wrote two botanical treatises summarizing the results of a millennium of experience, observation, and science from Egypt and Mesopotamia.
By the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century, experimental science had emerged. The fields of agronomy and plant breeding developed out of that milieu. In 1865 Gregor Mendel published Experiments on Plant Hybridization. Plant hybridization (or cross breeding) involves crosses between populations, breeds, or cultivars within a single species, incorporating the qualities of two different varieties into a single variety. Thus, the pollen of plants with one desired trait was transferred to a plant variety with other desired traits. This could only be achieved with plant varieties that were closely related.
Hybridization created plants more suitable for the palette of modern humans.
With the discovery in the first half of the twentieth century that radiation and chemicals could create mutations (or changes in the DNA code) in plant cells and germ plasm, plant breeders deliberately induced mutations that they hoped would produce more desirable plant varieties. This was a long, tedious, and unpredictable process. Nevertheless, it is estimated that more than 2,500 new plant varieties were produced using radiation mutagenesis.
Tissue culture engineering was another technique used in plant breeding. Once a desirable plant variety was found, the plant could be cloned by extracting a small piece of the plant tissue and inducing it to grow in cell culture with the appropriate media. Plant cloning from somatic cells was a forerunner to cloning of animals like Dolly the Sheep.
After the discovery of recombinant DNA molecule technology (aka gene transplantation) in the early 1970s, the new field of plant biotechnology was launched less than a decade later. Scientists were now capable of cutting and splicing genes and transferring them from one biological entity to another, thereby crossing broad species barriers. Plant biotechnology made its debut at an international symposium in Miami, Florida, in January 1983.2 Three independent groups of plant geneticists described experiments in which foreign genes were inserted into plants, leading to the creation of normal, fertile, transgenic plants, which means that they contained artificially inserted genes. The first plant used in these experiments was tobacco. And the vehicle for introducing the foreign genes into the plants was a bacterium called Agrobacterium tumefacients (A. tumefaciens).
The recombinant DNA debates had precipitated one of the greatest public science education periods in modern history, occurring at a time when environmental issues were of paramount social importance in the United States. The American consumer had begun to think about the quality, safety, and purity of food, and the organic food movement was underway. National environmental groups petitioned the government to remove dangerous pesticides from farming. In the 1980s when agricultural biotechnology was born, there was already a skepticism building among consumers and food activists that genetically modified organisms (or GMOs) would not contribute to these priorities.
While there have been longstanding controversies between vegetarians and omnivores or organic versus conventional farming, rarely has there been a time when food has divided society into two major warring camps. But that is the situation that people now find themselves throughout the world in response to genetically modified food. One camp proclaims that GMOs represent the future of food. They echo the words of Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century philosopher and scientist, who more than four hundred years ago in the New Atlantis, prophesied a future of biotechnology:
And we make by art, in the same orchards and gardens, trees and flowers to come earlier or later in their seasons, and to come up and bear more speedily, than by their natural course they do. We make them also by art greater much than their nature; and their fruit greater and sweeter, and of differing tastes, smell, colour, and figure from their nature.
Bacon saw the biotic world around him as providing the feedstock, or starting materials, for recreating plant life on the planet according to human design and utility. In more contemporary terms, the plant germ plasm holds the building blocks for new food crops just as the chemical elements of the Periodic Table were the starting material for synthetic chemistry that has brought us plastics, pesticides, and nanotechnology.
The Debate
In the view of the modern agricultural Baconians, farms are like factories. Food production must be as efficient as an assembly line. This means that the producers of food must reduce the uncertainty of inputs and speed up food production to cultivate more crops per given acre, per unit of time, per unit of labor, and per unit of resource input. They proclaim the need for higher food productivity to provide for a growing population of more than seven billion people on the planet. The American Council on Science and Health, a GMO -philic organization, believes that skeptics or non-believers are irrational luddites: “It’s truly mind-boggling that this technology, which has already provided so many benefits and will continue to do so, is being demonized to such a great extent. It’s a sad commentary on how susceptible a population deficient in scientific understanding can be to fear mongering activists with a scary agenda.”
The opposing camp is comprised largely of food purists, skeptics of industrial, high chemical input farming, critics of agribusiness, and scientists who are not convinced that genetically modified food is as safe and as ecologically sustainable as its proponents claim it to be. They point out that the altruistic promises of GMO proponents have had no relationship with the actual use of genetic engineering techniques in modern agricultural production. In fact, there have been only two commonly applied major innovations in GMO agriculture: 1) crops resistant to herbicide, and 2) crops that contain their own insecticide. Both methods were designed to find synergies with their corporate sponsor’s existing pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer businesses in order to maximize profits. For example, a farmer who buys Monsanto’s Roundup
Ready soybeans would also need to buy Monsanto’s Roundup Ready herbicide. The GMO skeptics further claim that neither method has any direct benefit to the consumer and that both are failing to achieve productivity expectations as both weeds and insects develop resistance to these toxins.
GMO skeptics harken back to the transformation of small-scale agriculture, where crop rotation, agro-ecological diversity, family farming, animal husbandry, taste, freshness, and purity were core values. Their perspective on GMOs can best be characterized by use of the acronym GAUF : Genetically Adulterated Unlabeled Food. Consumers, especially those not on the edge of poverty and famine, are asking more from their food than its price, its plentitude, its perfect geometry, its homogenous color, and its shelf life. They are demanding that their food be grown without the use of poisons, that animal protein not be harvested at the expense of the humane treatment of sentient beings, that agricultural practices not destroy the substrate of the natural ecology (the soil), and that modern agriculture not put an end to agrarian life by turning land-based food production into industrially based cell culture and hydroponics. Finally, they believe the entire agricultural system should be sustainable. In the end, they find that the GMO technology has so far only benefited a handful of corporations, that it is expensive, polluting, it may be unsafe for humans, and it is beginning to fail to meet its own instrumental objectives.
The two camps represent opposing world views about the role and structure of agriculture in modern civilization in the post industrial age. When you ask people from the pro- GMO camp what are their core values, they will likely say productivity, profit and safety. They have no intention of producing food that will make people sick as they declare, “We cannot stay in business if our product harms people.”
The GMO -skeptics have a more nuanced view of adverse consequences. Their concerns include whether GMOs will induce subtle changes in long-term health and nutritional quality, increase food allergies, incentivize non-sustainable farming practices, create dependency on chemical inputs, justify a lack of transparency in evaluating food quality and safety, or transform farming practices into a political economy resembling serfdom where the seed is intellectual property leased by the farmer. They also include advocates for a return to conventional methods of food production, which have been marginalized because they don’t offer corporations a higher profit margin. They note, for example, that conventional methods for creating drought resistance in crops actually create higher yields than GE methods.
A 2013 report in the Village Voice summed up the new political economy of GMO agriculture: “Monsanto’s thick contracts dropped like shackles on the kitchen table of every farmer who used the company’s seed, allowing Monsanto access to the farmers’ records and fields and prohibiting them from replanting leftover seed, essentially forcing farmers to buy new seed every year or face up to $3 million in damages.”
As agricultural biotechnology has developed, three methods have been widely used for the introduction of foreign genes into plants: 1) using a bacterium or virus to carry genes into a plant, 2) using electrical shock to get pure DNA into the plant cell’s nucleus, or 3) using microprojectiles coated with DNA .
According to a report by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications ( ISAAA ), a trade organization of the biotech industry, by 2012 genetically modified crops were planted on nearly a quarter of the world’s farm land, on 170 million hectares, by some 17.3 million farmers in 28 countries.
Why has a new food technology that splices DNA sequences into plant germ plasm with what is widely believed to be more precision than hybridization or mutagenesis created such controversy? The answer can be found in the essays contained in this volume which cover three decades of commentary and precautions regarding GMOs. The controversy over GMOs has divided scientists and food activists, some of whom consider GMOs benign while others believe they can reduce chemical inputs into agriculture and increase yield. The public and scientific criticism and skepticism over GMOs come from many directions. But they are connected by some form of risk evaluation. The following list of questions illustrate the range of concerns:
Are GMOs a health danger to consumers?
Do GMO crops offer farmers higher productivity or pest resistance at the expense of other crop benefits such as nutrition or taste?
Do GMOs reinforce and expand monoculture and destroy biodiversity?
Do GMOs create greater control by seed manufacturers over farmers?
Do GMOs result in one seed variety for all agricultural regions?
Do GMOs contribute to a more sustainable, locally empowered, and farmer-directed agriculture?
Do GMOs result in more or less dependency on toxic chemical inputs in agricultural production?
Do GMOs play a role in reducing world hunger?
Are the scientific studies of these questions carried out by independent scientists who have no financial interests in the outcome and who publish their findings in refereed journals?
The conventional view about GMOs held by the pro- GMO camp is expressed in this statement by Ania Wieczorek and Mark Wright:
All types of agriculture modify the genes of plants so that they will have desirable traits. The difference is that traditional forms of breeding change the plants genetics indirectly by selecting plants with specific traits, while genetic engineering changes the traits by making changes to the DNA . In traditional breeding, crosses are made in a relatively uncontrolled manner. The breeder chooses the parents to cross, but at the genetic level, the results are unpredictable. DNA from the parents recombine randomly. In contrast, genetic engineering permits highly targeted transfer of genes, quick and efficient tracking of genes in the varieties, and ultimately increased efficiency in developing new crop varieties with new and desirable traits.
The deception in this statement is that it mistakenly assumes that genetic engineering of plants is a precise technology for transplanting genes. The fact is that the insertion of foreign DNA is an imprecise and uncontrolled process. One of the common mistakes made by the pro- GMO advocates is that they treat the plant genome like a Lego construction where the insertion or deletion of a gene does not affect the other genes. They argue that adding new genes just adds new properties to the organism. This understanding of genetics was long ago proven obsolete in human biology where scientists have come to understand that most characteristics are influenced by complex interactions among multiple genes and the environment acting together. Yet proponents of GMOS continue to assert their safety based on such antiquated science. In fact the plant genome and that of any other complex living thing is like an ecosystem. This means that introducing or deleting new genes can affect other genes in the plant. This is called “pleiotropy” by biologists. There is another effect called “insertional mutagenesis” in which the added foreign genes causes a mutation in the DNA sequence proximate to it. For example, small changes in the plant genome can affect the expression of genes for nutrition or mycotoxins. There is only one way to tell and that is to test the plants that have been gene adulterated.
The fact that Americans have been consuming large amounts of GMO corn and soybeans does not mean that GMO crops are highly desirable nutritionally unless we know that other changes in the crop have not taken place. One report concludes, “Using the latest molecular analytical methods, GM crops have been shown to have different composition to their non-GM counterparts . . . even when the two crops are grown under the same conditions, at the same time and in the same location.”9 Studies have found that GMO soy contains lower amounts of isoflavones, GMO canola contains lower amounts of vitamin E, and GMO insecticidal rice has higher levels of sucrose, mannitol, and glutamic acid than its non- GMO counterparts. These are all results consumers should know about.
A 2009 paper in the International Journal of Biological Sciences analyzed blood and system data from trials where rats were fed three varieties of commercial varieties of genetically modified maize. They reported new side effects associated with the kidney and liver, which are the body’s primary detoxification organs. The authors of this paper strongly recommend additional long-term studies of the health risks.
Government and industry risk assessments have focused mainly on the foreign DNA introduced into the plant rather than the pleotropic effects on the plant’s genome. According to the European Commission, scientists have not found a deleterious protein introduced by genetic modification into a plant. “It can be concluded that transgenic DNA does not differ intrinsically or physically from any other DNA already present in foods and that the ingestion of transgenic DNA does not imply higher risks than ingestion of any other type of DNA .”10 And the ISAAA proclaims the commercialization of GMOs, which began in 1996, “confirmed the early promise of biotech crops to deliver substantial agronomic, environmental, economic, health, and social benefits to large and small scale farmers worldwide.”11 Yet in 2013 more than two hundred scientists were signatories to an open letter titled “No Scientific Consensus on GMO Safety.”
This takes us to another deception, and that is that GMOs are highly regulated.
The US regulatory framework for GMOs was issued in 1986 under the Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology (US OSTP , 1986). The regulatory authority for plant biotechnology was divided among three federal agencies: the US Department of Agriculture ( USDA ), the Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA ), and the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ). Under the authority of the Plant Pest Act and the Plant Quarantine Act, the USDA’s role is to insure that the GMO crop is not a plant pest—that it does not harm other crops. The EPA’s authority under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act ( FIFRA ) is over those GMO crops that possess pesticidal properties called PIPs or plants with insecticidal properties.” Thus, the EPA oversees crops bioengineered with genes that code for toxins in Bacillus thuriengensis (Bt), a natural pesticide used by organic farmers. The FDA’s authority over GMO crops is to insure human and animal safety on consumption. In 1992 the FDA issued voluntary guidelines for GMO crop manufacturers and affirmed that foreign genes introduced into crops (independent of the source) do not constitute a food additive. For the purpose of regulation, GMO crops were not to be treated any differently than hybrid crop varieties. GMO crop producers were advised to consult with the FDA according to a guidance flow chart. The FDA subsequently promulgated a mandatory pre-market non-fiction that included a requirement for GMO plant manufacturers who planned to release GMO crops, non-binding recommendations for early food safety evaluations13 and they also issued a draft guidance for labeling in January 2001.14 As of November 30, 2012 the EPA had forty-one PIPs registered including varieties of Bt corn, Bt soybeans and Bt cotton.
The FDA’s approach to risk assessment of GMO crops is based on the concept of “substantial equivalence.” While the concept has never been well-defined, it is based on the idea that when a few components of the GMO crop such as certain nutrients and amino acids are similar in content to its non- GMO counterpart, the GMO crop is declared “substantially equivalent.” The vagueness of the concept and its application to risk assessment has been widely criticized.16 The late Marc Lappé wrote, “At the core of the debate between anti-biotechnology activists and its proponents is the assertion that no meaningful differences exist between conventional and genetically engineered food. Establishing the truth of this assertion was critical to deregulating various commodity crops.”17 As previously mentioned, there is growing evidence that GMO crops can have different protein composition than non- GMO varieties.
Under its nonbinding recommendations for industry of “Non-Pesticidal Proteins Produced by New Plant Varieties Intended for Food Use introduced on June 2006,” the FDA requires the manufacturer to provide the name, identity, and function of any new protein produced in a new plant variety. It also requires information as to whether the new protein has been safely consumed in foods; the sources, purpose, or intended technical effect of the introduced genetic material; the amino acid similarity of the new protein with and known allergens and toxins; and the stability and resistance to enzymatic degradation of the protein. Within 120 days after submission for a GMO crop, the FDA will alert the manufacturer whether it has been accepted or whether there are questions about the submission (see note 6). The FDA’s data requirements do not include changes to the other gene expressions in the plant, with mutational mutagenesis and pleiotropy. As of April 2013, the FDA completed ninety-five consultations including thirty for corn, fifteen for cotton, twelve for canola, twelve for soybean, and twenty-four for all other crops including alfalfa, cantaloupe, flax, papaya, plum, potato, squash, sugar beet, tomato, and wheat. These consultations have accepted the assurances from the biotechnology industry that their safety assessment is reliable. The information the FDA receives is shrouded in confidential business information and is not transparent to the independent scientific community on the methods used and the application of the “weight of evidence.”
In a report titled “Potential Health Effects of Foods Derived from Genetically Engineered Plants: What Are the Issues?” published by the Third World Network (an international NGO ), two scientists proposed a de minimus list of tests that should serve as the basis for GMO crop health assessment. The report rejects the a priori claim that GMO and hybrid crops should be treated the same. The requirement cited in the report includes a full biochemical, nutrition, and toxicological comparison between the transgene product implanted in the germ plasm of the recipient plant and the original source organism of the transgene. The report also includes a molecular examination of the possible secondary DNA inserts into the plant genome; an assessment of the variation of known toxins of GMO plants grown under different agronomic conditions; and an investigation of the nutritional, immunological, hormonal properties and the allergenicity of GMO products. Some of these tests should involve laboratory animals. The authors state, “Compositional studies and animal tests are but the first in GM risk assessment. Next, long-term, preferably lifetime-long metabolism, immunological and reproduction studies with male and female laboratory and other animal species should also be conducted under controlled conditions.”
The gap between what is being proposed by independent scientists and what is actually being done in hazard assessment of GMO crops is gargantuan. Nowhere is it greater than in the United States where the food safety requirements for GMO crops are similar to the chemical food additives designated as “generally regarded as safe” (or GRAS ). In both cases the evaluation of health effects largely has been left to the manufacturers.
As voters in Oregon and Colorado head to the polls next week to decide if they support labeling laws for genetically modified organisms, on Tuesday we will be joined by Sheldon Krimsky to discuss his new book, The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk. The book has a forward by Ralph Nader and is a compilation of thought-provoking essays by leading scientists, science writers and public health advocates who, in their writing, explore the social, environmental and moral consequences of GMOs. You can read the introduction below.

Sheldon Krimsky is professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at the Tufts School of Medicine. Krimsky is also a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.

Excerpted with permission from The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber. Copyright 2014, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

INTRODUCTION–The Science and Regulation behind the GMO Deception

Agriculture had its origins about ten thousand years ago. Throughout most of that period farmers shared seeds, selected desired phenotypes of plants, and with keen observation and experience sought to understand the environmental factors affecting crop productivity. Through selective breeding, farmers chose plants that were best adapted to their region. By saving seeds of the more desired varieties they were able to achieve shortened growing seasons, larger fruits or vegetables, enhanced disease resistance and varieties with higher nutritional value. The birth of botany as a discipline can be traced to ancient Greece. Theophrastus of Eresos (371–287 BCE), a student of Aristotle, wrote two botanical treatises summarizing the results of a millennium of experience, observation, and science from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

By the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century, experimental science had emerged. The fields of agronomy and plant breeding developed out of that milieu. In 1865 Gregor Mendel published Experiments on Plant Hybridization. Plant hybridization (or cross breeding) involves crosses between populations, breeds, or cultivars within a single species, incorporating the qualities of two different varieties into a single variety. Thus, the pollen of plants with one desired trait was transferred to a plant variety with other desired traits. This could only be achieved with plant varieties that were closely related.

Hybridization created plants more suitable for the palette of modern humans.

With the discovery in the first half of the twentieth century that radiation and chemicals could create mutations (or changes in the DNA code) in plant cells and germ plasm, plant breeders deliberately induced mutations that they hoped would produce more desirable plant varieties. This was a long, tedious, and unpredictable process. Nevertheless, it is estimated that more than 2,500 new plant varieties were produced using radiation mutagenesis.

Tissue culture engineering was another technique used in plant breeding. Once a desirable plant variety was found, the plant could be cloned by extracting a small piece of the plant tissue and inducing it to grow in cell culture with the appropriate media. Plant cloning from somatic cells was a forerunner to cloning of animals like Dolly the Sheep.

After the discovery of recombinant DNA molecule technology (aka gene transplantation) in the early 1970s, the new field of plant biotechnology was launched less than a decade later. Scientists were now capable of cutting and splicing genes and transferring them from one biological entity to another, thereby crossing broad species barriers. Plant biotechnology made its debut at an international symposium in Miami, Florida, in January 1983.2 Three independent groups of plant geneticists described experiments in which foreign genes were inserted into plants, leading to the creation of normal, fertile, transgenic plants, which means that they contained artificially inserted genes. The first plant used in these experiments was tobacco. And the vehicle for introducing the foreign genes into the plants was a bacterium called Agrobacterium tumefacients (A. tumefaciens).

The recombinant DNA debates had precipitated one of the greatest public science education periods in modern history, occurring at a time when environmental issues were of paramount social importance in the United States. The American consumer had begun to think about the quality, safety, and purity of food, and the organic food movement was underway. National environmental groups petitioned the government to remove dangerous pesticides from farming. In the 1980s when agricultural biotechnology was born, there was already a skepticism building among consumers and food activists that genetically modified organisms (or GMOs) would not contribute to these priorities.

While there have been longstanding controversies between vegetarians and omnivores or organic versus conventional farming, rarely has there been a time when food has divided society into two major warring camps. But that is the situation that people now find themselves throughout the world in response to genetically modified food. One camp proclaims that GMOs represent the future of food. They echo the words of Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century philosopher and scientist, who more than four hundred years ago in the New Atlantis, prophesied a future of biotechnology:

And we make by art, in the same orchards and gardens, trees and flowers to come earlier or later in their seasons, and to come up and bear more speedily, than by their natural course they do. We make them also by art greater much than their nature; and their fruit greater and sweeter, and of differing tastes, smell, colour, and figure from their nature.

Bacon saw the biotic world around him as providing the feedstock, or starting materials, for recreating plant life on the planet according to human design and utility. In more contemporary terms, the plant germ plasm holds the building blocks for new food crops just as the chemical elements of the Periodic Table were the starting material for synthetic chemistry that has brought us plastics, pesticides, and nanotechnology.

The Debate

In the view of the modern agricultural Baconians, farms are like factories. Food production must be as efficient as an assembly line. This means that the producers of food must reduce the uncertainty of inputs and speed up food production to cultivate more crops per given acre, per unit of time, per unit of labor, and per unit of resource input. They proclaim the need for higher food productivity to provide for a growing population of more than seven billion people on the planet. The American Council on Science and Health, a GMO-philic organization, believes that skeptics or non-believers are irrational luddites: “It’s truly mind-boggling that this technology, which has already provided so many benefits and will continue to do so, is being demonized to such a great extent. It’s a sad commentary on how susceptible a population deficient in scientific understanding can be to fear mongering activists with a scary agenda.”

The opposing camp is comprised largely of food purists, skeptics of industrial, high chemical input farming, critics of agribusiness, and scientists who are not convinced that genetically modified food is as safe and as ecologically sustainable as its proponents claim it to be. They point out that the altruistic promises of GMO proponents have had no relationship with the actual use of genetic engineering techniques in modern agricultural production. In fact, there have been only two commonly applied major innovations in GMO agriculture: 1) crops resistant to herbicide, and 2) crops that contain their own insecticide. Both methods were designed to find synergies with their corporate sponsor’s existing pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer businesses in order to maximize profits. For example, a farmer who buys Monsanto’s Roundup
Ready soybeans would also need to buy Monsanto’s Roundup Ready herbicide. The GMO skeptics further claim that neither method has any direct benefit to the consumer and that both are failing to achieve productivity expectations as both weeds and insects develop resistance to these toxins.

GMO skeptics harken back to the transformation of small-scale agriculture, where crop rotation, agro-ecological diversity, family farming, animal husbandry, taste, freshness, and purity were core values. Their perspective on GMOs can best be characterized by use of the acronym GAUF: Genetically Adulterated Unlabeled Food. Consumers, especially those not on the edge of poverty and famine, are asking more from their food than its price, its plentitude, its perfect geometry, its homogenous color, and its shelf life. They are demanding that their food be grown without the use of poisons, that animal protein not be harvested at the expense of the humane treatment of sentient beings, that agricultural practices not destroy the substrate of the natural ecology (the soil), and that modern agriculture not put an end to agrarian life by turning land-based food production into industrially based cell culture and hydroponics. Finally, they believe the entire agricultural system should be sustainable. In the end, they find that the GMO technology has so far only benefited a handful of corporations, that it is expensive, polluting, it may be unsafe for humans, and it is beginning to fail to meet its own instrumental objectives.

The two camps represent opposing world views about the role and structure of agriculture in modern civilization in the post industrial age. When you ask people from the pro-GMO camp what are their core values, they will likely say productivity, profit and safety. They have no intention of producing food that will make people sick as they declare, “We cannot stay in business if our product harms people.”

The GMO-skeptics have a more nuanced view of adverse consequences. Their concerns include whether GMOs will induce subtle changes in long-term health and nutritional quality, increase food allergies, incentivize non-sustainable farming practices, create dependency on chemical inputs, justify a lack of transparency in evaluating food quality and safety, or transform farming practices into a political economy resembling serfdom where the seed is intellectual property leased by the farmer. They also include advocates for a return to conventional methods of food production, which have been marginalized because they don’t offer corporations a higher profit margin. They note, for example, that conventional methods for creating drought resistance in crops actually create higher yields than GE methods.

A 2013 report in the Village Voice summed up the new political economy of GMO agriculture: “Monsanto’s thick contracts dropped like shackles on the kitchen table of every farmer who used the company’s seed, allowing Monsanto access to the farmers’ records and fields and prohibiting them from replanting leftover seed, essentially forcing farmers to buy new seed every year or face up to $3 million in damages.”

As agricultural biotechnology has developed, three methods have been widely used for the introduction of foreign genes into plants: 1) using a bacterium or virus to carry genes into a plant, 2) using electrical shock to get pure DNA into the plant cell’s nucleus, or 3) using microprojectiles coated with DNA.
According to a report by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), a trade organization of the biotech industry, by 2012 genetically modified crops were planted on nearly a quarter of the world’s farm land, on 170 million hectares, by some 17.3 million farmers in 28 countries.

Why has a new food technology that splices DNA sequences into plant germ plasm with what is widely believed to be more precision than hybridization or mutagenesis created such controversy? The answer can be found in the essays contained in this volume which cover three decades of commentary and precautions regarding GMOs. The controversy over GMOs has divided scientists and food activists, some of whom consider GMOs benign while others believe they can reduce chemical inputs into agriculture and increase yield. The public and scientific criticism and skepticism over GMOs come from many directions. But they are connected by some form of risk evaluation. The following list of questions illustrate the range of concerns:

Are GMOs a health danger to consumers?
Do GMO crops offer farmers higher productivity or pest resistance at the expense of other crop benefits such as nutrition or taste?
Do GMOs reinforce and expand monoculture and destroy biodiversity?
Do GMOs create greater control by seed manufacturers over farmers?
Do GMOs result in one seed variety for all agricultural regions?
Do GMOs contribute to a more sustainable, locally empowered, and farmer-directed agriculture?
Do GMOs result in more or less dependency on toxic chemical inputs in agricultural production?
Do GMOs play a role in reducing world hunger?
Are the scientific studies of these questions carried out by independent scientists who have no financial interests in the outcome and who publish their findings in refereed journals?

The conventional view about GMOs held by the pro-GMO camp is expressed in this statement by Ania Wieczorek and Mark Wright:

All types of agriculture modify the genes of plants so that they will have desirable traits. The difference is that traditional forms of breeding change the plants genetics indirectly by selecting plants with specific traits, while genetic engineering changes the traits by making changes to the DNA. In traditional breeding, crosses are made in a relatively uncontrolled manner. The breeder chooses the parents to cross, but at the genetic level, the results are unpredictable. DNA from the parents recombine randomly. In contrast, genetic engineering permits highly targeted transfer of genes, quick and efficient tracking of genes in the varieties, and ultimately increased efficiency in developing new crop varieties with new and desirable traits.

The deception in this statement is that it mistakenly assumes that genetic engineering of plants is a precise technology for transplanting genes. The fact is that the insertion of foreign DNA is an imprecise and uncontrolled process. One of the common mistakes made by the pro-GMO advocates is that they treat the plant genome like a Lego construction where the insertion or deletion of a gene does not affect the other genes. They argue that adding new genes just adds new properties to the organism. This understanding of genetics was long ago proven obsolete in human biology where scientists have come to understand that most characteristics are influenced by complex interactions among multiple genes and the environment acting together. Yet proponents of GMOS continue to assert their safety based on such antiquated science. In fact the plant genome and that of any other complex living thing is like an ecosystem. This means that introducing or deleting new genes can affect other genes in the plant. This is called “pleiotropy” by biologists. There is another effect called “insertional mutagenesis” in which the added foreign genes causes a mutation in the DNA sequence proximate to it. For example, small changes in the plant genome can affect the expression of genes for nutrition or mycotoxins. There is only one way to tell and that is to test the plants that have been gene adulterated.

The fact that Americans have been consuming large amounts of GMO corn and soybeans does not mean that GMO crops are highly desirable nutritionally unless we know that other changes in the crop have not taken place. One report concludes, “Using the latest molecular analytical methods, GM crops have been shown to have different composition to their non-GM counterparts . . . even when the two crops are grown under the same conditions, at the same time and in the same location.”9 Studies have found that GMO soy contains lower amounts of isoflavones, GMO canola contains lower amounts of vitamin E, and GMO insecticidal rice has higher levels of sucrose, mannitol, and glutamic acid than its non-GMO counterparts. These are all results consumers should know about.

A 2009 paper in the International Journal of Biological Sciences analyzed blood and system data from trials where rats were fed three varieties of commercial varieties of genetically modified maize. They reported new side effects associated with the kidney and liver, which are the body’s primary detoxification organs. The authors of this paper strongly recommend additional long-term studies of the health risks.

Government and industry risk assessments have focused mainly on the foreign DNA introduced into the plant rather than the pleotropic effects on the plant’s genome. According to the European Commission, scientists have not found a deleterious protein introduced by genetic modification into a plant. “It can be concluded that transgenic DNA does not differ intrinsically or physically from any other DNA already present in foods and that the ingestion of transgenic DNA does not imply higher risks than ingestion of any other type of DNA.”10 And the ISAAA proclaims the commercialization of GMOs, which began in 1996, “confirmed the early promise of biotech crops to deliver substantial agronomic, environmental, economic, health, and social benefits to large and small scale farmers worldwide.”11 Yet in 2013 more than two hundred scientists were signatories to an open letter titled “No Scientific Consensus on GMO Safety.”

This takes us to another deception, and that is that GMOs are highly regulated.
The US regulatory framework for GMOs was issued in 1986 under the Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology (US OSTP, 1986). The regulatory authority for plant biotechnology was divided among three federal agencies: the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Under the authority of the Plant Pest Act and the Plant Quarantine Act, the USDA’s role is to insure that the GMO crop is not a plant pest—that it does not harm other crops. The EPA’s authority under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) is over those GMO crops that possess pesticidal properties called PIPs or plants with insecticidal properties.” Thus, the EPA oversees crops bioengineered with genes that code for toxins in Bacillus thuriengensis (Bt), a natural pesticide used by organic farmers. The FDA’s authority over GMO crops is to insure human and animal safety on consumption. In 1992 the FDA issued voluntary guidelines for GMO crop manufacturers and affirmed that foreign genes introduced into crops (independent of the source) do not constitute a food additive. For the purpose of regulation, GMO crops were not to be treated any differently than hybrid crop varieties. GMO crop producers were advised to consult with the FDA according to a guidance flow chart. The FDA subsequently promulgated a mandatory pre-market non-fiction that included a requirement for GMO plant manufacturers who planned to release GMO crops, non-binding recommendations for early food safety evaluations13 and they also issued a draft guidance for labeling in January 2001.14 As of November 30, 2012 the EPA had forty-one PIPs registered including varieties of Bt corn, Bt soybeans and Bt cotton.

The FDA’s approach to risk assessment of GMO crops is based on the concept of “substantial equivalence.” While the concept has never been well-defined, it is based on the idea that when a few components of the GMO crop such as certain nutrients and amino acids are similar in content to its non- GMO counterpart, the GMO crop is declared “substantially equivalent.” The vagueness of the concept and its application to risk assessment has been widely criticized.16 The late Marc Lappé wrote, “At the core of the debate between anti-biotechnology activists and its proponents is the assertion that no meaningful differences exist between conventional and genetically engineered food. Establishing the truth of this assertion was critical to deregulating various commodity crops.”17 As previously mentioned, there is growing evidence that GMO crops can have different protein composition than non-GMO varieties.

Under its nonbinding recommendations for industry of “Non-Pesticidal Proteins Produced by New Plant Varieties Intended for Food Use introduced on June 2006,” the FDA requires the manufacturer to provide the name, identity, and function of any new protein produced in a new plant variety. It also requires information as to whether the new protein has been safely consumed in foods; the sources, purpose, or intended technical effect of the introduced genetic material; the amino acid similarity of the new protein with and known allergens and toxins; and the stability and resistance to enzymatic degradation of the protein. Within 120 days after submission for a GMO crop, the FDA will alert the manufacturer whether it has been accepted or whether there are questions about the submission (see note 6). The FDA’s data requirements do not include changes to the other gene expressions in the plant, with mutational mutagenesis and pleiotropy. As of April 2013, the FDA completed ninety-five consultations including thirty for corn, fifteen for cotton, twelve for canola, twelve for soybean, and twenty-four for all other crops including alfalfa, cantaloupe, flax, papaya, plum, potato, squash, sugar beet, tomato, and wheat. These consultations have accepted the assurances from the biotechnology industry that their safety assessment is reliable. The information the FDA receives is shrouded in confidential business information and is not transparent to the independent scientific community on the methods used and the application of the “weight of evidence.”

In a report titled “Potential Health Effects of Foods Derived from Genetically Engineered Plants: What Are the Issues?” published by the Third World Network (an international NGO), two scientists proposed a de minimus list of tests that should serve as the basis for GMO crop health assessment. The report rejects the a priori claim that GMO and hybrid crops should be treated the same. The requirement cited in the report includes a full biochemical, nutrition, and toxicological comparison between the transgene product implanted in the germ plasm of the recipient plant and the original source organism of the transgene. The report also includes a molecular examination of the possible secondary DNA inserts into the plant genome; an assessment of the variation of known toxins of GMO plants grown under different agronomic conditions; and an investigation of the nutritional, immunological, hormonal properties and the allergenicity of GMO products. Some of these tests should involve laboratory animals. The authors state, “Compositional studies and animal tests are but the first in GM risk assessment. Next, long-term, preferably lifetime-long metabolism, immunological and reproduction studies with male and female laboratory and other animal species should also be conducted under controlled conditions.”

The gap between what is being proposed by independent scientists and what is actually being done in hazard assessment of GMO crops is gargantuan. Nowhere is it greater than in the United States where the food safety requirements for GMO crops are similar to the chemical food additives designated as “generally regarded as safe” (or GRAS). In both cases the evaluation of health effects largely has been left to the manufacturers.

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Mon, 27 Oct 2014 21:24:00 -0400"As Consumers, We are Guinea Pigs": Vermont Set to Become First State to Require GMO Food Labelinghttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/29/as_consumers_we_are_guinea_pigs
tag:democracynow.org,2014-04-29:en/story/b4f5a9 AARON MATÉ: We end today&#8217;s show in Vermont, which is poised to become the first state to require the labeling of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. A pro- GMO -labeling bill passed both chambers—passed by both chambers is now on the way to the Governor Peter Shumlin&#8217;s desk, where he is expected to sign the bill as early as this week. The new law would take effect in July of 2016. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is among those who supports the effort to label GMO foods.
SEN . BERNIE SANDERS : The truth of the matter is, is that labeling of GMOs is also not a radical concept. It exists throughout the European Union. In fact, it exists throughout dozens and dozens of countries throughout the world. So anyone who tells you, &quot;Well, we can&#8217;t do this, this is just too complicated,&quot; they&#8217;re not telling you the truth.
AMY GOODMAN : Twenty-nine other states have proposed bills requiring GMO labeling this year, and two have already passed bills requiring labeling, like Connecticut, but those measures only take effect when neighboring states also approve the requirements.
For more, we go to Vermont via Democracy Now! video stream to Vermont State Senator David Zuckerman of the Progressive Party. He&#8217;s an organic farmer himself, who introduced the GMO labeling bills more than a decade ago when he was in the Vermont House. He co-owns Full Moon Farm.
David Zuckerman, welcome to Democracy Now! What happened? Explain what this bill actually means.
SEN . DAVID ZUCKERMAN : Well, what this bill means is, in 2016, when the average customer goes into a store, they can look at a package, and on that package somewhere there will be an indicator that the food was partially or completely made with genetic engineering.
AMY GOODMAN : And how did it happen? Talk about the origins of this legislation and why you think this is so important.
SEN . DAVID ZUCKERMAN : Well, really, in Vermont, we&#8217;ve been having discussions around genetic engineering in our food for well over a decade. And I&#8217;ve been in politics doing that as a spokesperson, really, for thousands of people across the state. And the momentum has just been building and building. We had a seed labeling and registration law that we passed about a decade ago. We had a bill that was going to require the manufacturers of these seeds to be responsible for them economically and environmentally. That passed but got vetoed by our governor about six years ago—a different governor, I should add. And then, in the last couple years, a real movement has been building for product labeling, as you know, both across the country and here in Vermont.
AARON MATÉ: Now, when similar measures came up in Washington and California, we saw food companies and Monsanto spend tens of millions of dollars to defeat those bills. So what kind of opposition did you face here? And do you expect legal challenges after it&#8217;s enacted into law?
SEN . DAVID ZUCKERMAN : Well, I think many people would be surprised that there was not the airwave bombardment like there was in California and Washington. And in part, I think that&#8217;s because the average Vermonter was so much more aware, that I think those companies felt it was an uphill battle here. They already had a population of people that were much more knowledgeable and wouldn&#8217;t succumb to some of the propaganda that were in those kinds of ads, like your food&#8217;s going to be 10 percent more, or &quot;this feeds the world,&quot; when really there&#8217;s plenty of food in the world; it&#8217;s other issues as to why people are hungry. On the other hand, I do think that it&#8217;s likely that the Grocery Manufacturers Association or some organization that represents a lot of the food manufacturers will probably sue us. And a lot of our work here in Vermont was working to draft a bill that would withstand such a lawsuit.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to Margaret Laggis, the executive director of United Dairy Farmers of Vermont, also a lobbyist for the trade group Biotechnology Industry Organization, whose members include seed manufacturer Monsanto. She told the Burlington Free Press that pro-labeling activists use scare tactics such as telling people they were being used as guinea pigs for GMO products. Laggis went on to tell the Burlington Free Press , quote, &quot;Once you scare people about their food, it&#8217;s such a personally intimidating thing for people. It&#8217;s really unfortunate that people have been scared when there&#8217;s no science to support it.&quot; That was—this is Margaret Laggis speaking to the Council for Biotechnology Information in 2010.
MARGARET LAGGIS : Most people who are eating food today don&#8217;t have any kind of scientific background, and so they have no basis to understand what food biotechnology is. They don&#8217;t understand the benefits to the environment, the benefits for the farmer. And so there&#8217;s just a huge education problem. And really, if we&#8217;re going to be supersuccessful in the coming years to getting people to be very comfortable with this technology, we&#8217;re going to have to do a lot more education and outreach.
AMY GOODMAN : So, that is Margaret Laggis. State Senator David Zuckerman, respond.
SEN . DAVID ZUCKERMAN : Sure.
AMY GOODMAN : Why you&#8217;re so concerned about GMOs?
SEN . DAVID ZUCKERMAN : Well, for a long time, there actually weren&#8217;t long-term epidemiological studies on the impacts for humans, and it only just started having reasonable studies, because the seed companies controlled their seed and controlled their product for scientific research. Out of the European Union and some other areas, there are beginnings to—signs of scientific questions around how it impacts our digestive system and potentially even crosses placental barriers into fetuses. So there&#8217;s a lot of scientific questions. And so, yes, I do think, as consumers, we are guinea pigs, because we really don&#8217;t understand the ramifications of this.
I would also add, as an organic farmer, one of the things that these seed companies have used in their product is a naturally occurring bacteria that they&#8217;ve taken the gene from to make those crops resistant to certain pests. Unfortunately, with overuse of those genetic technologies, some of those pests are actually starting to show resistance. There was recently an article in The Wall Street Journal around the corn borer. And over time, what that means is that those naturally occurring tools that folks like myself and other organic farmers use in a very judicious way, by overusing them in the biotech industry, they&#8217;re going to make those tools obsolete, which means either more chemical use on conventional farms or certain products not even becoming available as organically produced because eventually those pests would not be—we couldn&#8217;t thwart those pests. So there&#8217;s some real issues there.
She also mentioned that environmentally this is a good tool. In Tennessee alone, it was reported in a national conventional agricultural magazine, they&#8217;re going to have to spend 120 million more dollars this year on added chemicals to their fields because glyphosate is no longer working like it once did. There are so many weeds that are resistant to it because of the overuse of Roundup Ready products, that in fact now stronger and more volumes of chemicals are starting to be used. So those trends are really turning around on the biotech industry, and I don&#8217;t think their information is accurate.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, we want to thank you very much, Vermont State Senator David Zuckerman of the Progressive Party, also an organic farmer. We will follow this legislation when Governor Peter Shumlin signs it, which he&#8217;s expected to do very soon, against—around the labeling of GMO products.
That does it for our show. Tonight, Democracy Now! co-host Juan González will be speaking at a screening of his film, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America . It&#8217;s taking place in the Capitol at 5:30 in the visitors&#8217; center. You can go to our website at democracynow.org for details . I&#8217;ll also be speaking at Dartmouth College on Friday, May 2nd, at 5:00 p.m.—there&#8217;s a change of time—at Cook Auditorium, and you can check democracynow.org . AARON MATÉ: We end today’s show in Vermont, which is poised to become the first state to require the labeling of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. A pro-GMO-labeling bill passed both chambers—passed by both chambers is now on the way to the Governor Peter Shumlin’s desk, where he is expected to sign the bill as early as this week. The new law would take effect in July of 2016. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is among those who supports the effort to label GMO foods.

SEN. BERNIESANDERS: The truth of the matter is, is that labeling of GMOs is also not a radical concept. It exists throughout the European Union. In fact, it exists throughout dozens and dozens of countries throughout the world. So anyone who tells you, "Well, we can’t do this, this is just too complicated," they’re not telling you the truth.

AMYGOODMAN: Twenty-nine other states have proposed bills requiring GMO labeling this year, and two have already passed bills requiring labeling, like Connecticut, but those measures only take effect when neighboring states also approve the requirements.

For more, we go to Vermont via Democracy Now! video stream to Vermont State Senator David Zuckerman of the Progressive Party. He’s an organic farmer himself, who introduced the GMO labeling bills more than a decade ago when he was in the Vermont House. He co-owns Full Moon Farm.

David Zuckerman, welcome to Democracy Now! What happened? Explain what this bill actually means.

SEN. DAVIDZUCKERMAN: Well, what this bill means is, in 2016, when the average customer goes into a store, they can look at a package, and on that package somewhere there will be an indicator that the food was partially or completely made with genetic engineering.

AMYGOODMAN: And how did it happen? Talk about the origins of this legislation and why you think this is so important.

SEN. DAVIDZUCKERMAN: Well, really, in Vermont, we’ve been having discussions around genetic engineering in our food for well over a decade. And I’ve been in politics doing that as a spokesperson, really, for thousands of people across the state. And the momentum has just been building and building. We had a seed labeling and registration law that we passed about a decade ago. We had a bill that was going to require the manufacturers of these seeds to be responsible for them economically and environmentally. That passed but got vetoed by our governor about six years ago—a different governor, I should add. And then, in the last couple years, a real movement has been building for product labeling, as you know, both across the country and here in Vermont.

AARON MATÉ: Now, when similar measures came up in Washington and California, we saw food companies and Monsanto spend tens of millions of dollars to defeat those bills. So what kind of opposition did you face here? And do you expect legal challenges after it’s enacted into law?

SEN. DAVIDZUCKERMAN: Well, I think many people would be surprised that there was not the airwave bombardment like there was in California and Washington. And in part, I think that’s because the average Vermonter was so much more aware, that I think those companies felt it was an uphill battle here. They already had a population of people that were much more knowledgeable and wouldn’t succumb to some of the propaganda that were in those kinds of ads, like your food’s going to be 10 percent more, or "this feeds the world," when really there’s plenty of food in the world; it’s other issues as to why people are hungry. On the other hand, I do think that it’s likely that the Grocery Manufacturers Association or some organization that represents a lot of the food manufacturers will probably sue us. And a lot of our work here in Vermont was working to draft a bill that would withstand such a lawsuit.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to Margaret Laggis, the executive director of United Dairy Farmers of Vermont, also a lobbyist for the trade group Biotechnology Industry Organization, whose members include seed manufacturer Monsanto. She told the Burlington Free Press that pro-labeling activists use scare tactics such as telling people they were being used as guinea pigs for GMO products. Laggis went on to tell the Burlington Free Press, quote, "Once you scare people about their food, it’s such a personally intimidating thing for people. It’s really unfortunate that people have been scared when there’s no science to support it." That was—this is Margaret Laggis speaking to the Council for Biotechnology Information in 2010.

MARGARETLAGGIS: Most people who are eating food today don’t have any kind of scientific background, and so they have no basis to understand what food biotechnology is. They don’t understand the benefits to the environment, the benefits for the farmer. And so there’s just a huge education problem. And really, if we’re going to be supersuccessful in the coming years to getting people to be very comfortable with this technology, we’re going to have to do a lot more education and outreach.

AMYGOODMAN: So, that is Margaret Laggis. State Senator David Zuckerman, respond.

SEN. DAVIDZUCKERMAN: Sure.

AMYGOODMAN: Why you’re so concerned about GMOs?

SEN. DAVIDZUCKERMAN: Well, for a long time, there actually weren’t long-term epidemiological studies on the impacts for humans, and it only just started having reasonable studies, because the seed companies controlled their seed and controlled their product for scientific research. Out of the European Union and some other areas, there are beginnings to—signs of scientific questions around how it impacts our digestive system and potentially even crosses placental barriers into fetuses. So there’s a lot of scientific questions. And so, yes, I do think, as consumers, we are guinea pigs, because we really don’t understand the ramifications of this.

I would also add, as an organic farmer, one of the things that these seed companies have used in their product is a naturally occurring bacteria that they’ve taken the gene from to make those crops resistant to certain pests. Unfortunately, with overuse of those genetic technologies, some of those pests are actually starting to show resistance. There was recently an article in The Wall Street Journal around the corn borer. And over time, what that means is that those naturally occurring tools that folks like myself and other organic farmers use in a very judicious way, by overusing them in the biotech industry, they’re going to make those tools obsolete, which means either more chemical use on conventional farms or certain products not even becoming available as organically produced because eventually those pests would not be—we couldn’t thwart those pests. So there’s some real issues there.

She also mentioned that environmentally this is a good tool. In Tennessee alone, it was reported in a national conventional agricultural magazine, they’re going to have to spend 120 million more dollars this year on added chemicals to their fields because glyphosate is no longer working like it once did. There are so many weeds that are resistant to it because of the overuse of Roundup Ready products, that in fact now stronger and more volumes of chemicals are starting to be used. So those trends are really turning around on the biotech industry, and I don’t think their information is accurate.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you very much, Vermont State Senator David Zuckerman of the Progressive Party, also an organic farmer. We will follow this legislation when Governor Peter Shumlin signs it, which he’s expected to do very soon, against—around the labeling of GMO products.

That does it for our show. Tonight, Democracy Now! co-host Juan González will be speaking at a screening of his film, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. It’s taking place in the Capitol at 5:30 in the visitors’ center. You can go to our website at democracynow.org for details. I’ll also be speaking at Dartmouth College on Friday, May 2nd, at 5:00 p.m.—there’s a change of time—at Cook Auditorium, and you can check democracynow.org.

]]>
Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0400U.N. Climate Panel Issues Dire Warning of Threat to Global Food Supply, Calls for Action & Adaptionhttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/2/un_climate_panel_issues_dire_warning
tag:democracynow.org,2014-04-02:en/story/e76b64 NERMEEN SHAIKH : The United Nations&#8217; top climate body has warned that human-driven climate change has impacted every corner of the globe, with the poorest suffering the worst effects. In its latest report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says greenhouse gases have driven up global temperatures and extreme weather, while threatening sources of food and water.
And the worst is yet to come. The report declared, quote, &quot;Throughout the 21st century, climate-change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hot spots of hunger.&quot; Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC , said nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change.
RAJENDRA PACHAURI : There is a reason for the world not really neglecting the findings of this report, because they are profound. And let me repeat once again, we have said very categorically in this report, the implications for human security. We have reasons to believe that if the world doesn&#8217;t do anything about mitigating the emissions of greenhouse gases and the extent of climate change continues to increase, then the very social stability of human systems could be at stake.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re joined now by three guests. Here in New York, Michael Oppenheimer is with us, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. He&#8217;s one of the main authors of the 32-volume report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In London, Saleemul Huq joins us, a climate scientist at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, also the director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. He&#8217;s the lead author of one of the chapters in the just-released IPCC report.
And Tim Gore is head of policy for Food and Climate Justice at Oxfam. He was a civil society observer at the recent IPCC meeting in Yokohama, Japan, joining us by Democracy Now! video stream from Sweden.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Let&#8217;s begin with Saleemul Huq in London. Can you talk about the significance of this report, how it differs from the previous report and the warning that it represents in the world?
SALEEMUL HUQ : Well, it&#8217;s made a significant new finding since the last report seven years ago, in that we now have very, very strong evidence of climate change actually happening all over the world on—both on land as well as in the oceans, which we didn&#8217;t have the last time around. So there&#8217;s no question that it&#8217;s already happening and we&#8217;re living in a climate-changed world already. It then goes on to make projections into the future and says that if we continue to warm at the rate that we are now, we&#8217;re heading for 4 degrees or above by the end of the century, and that is really a catastrophic scenario in terms of the potential impacts that are likely to happen. Even at a lower temperature of 2 degrees, we can still possibly manage, but there will be significant losses in certain parts of the world of ecosystems and, indeed, human lives, as well.
AMY GOODMAN : And that 2 percent, just explain for—we have a global audience, but, of course, we have a lot of Americans here, and the 2 percent is more—2 degrees, rather.
SALEEMUL HUQ : Sure. Well, it&#8217;s 2 degrees centigrade, which is over three-and-a-half degrees Fahrenheit. And that&#8217;s the temperature threshold at which the global leaders in countries around the world have agreed that we need to stay below that, under which we can probably manage to cope with the impacts in most parts of the world, although even that will be difficult in some parts of the world. But if we go well above that to 4 degrees, which is where we are headed at the moment, then we would not only double, but we increase by orders of magnitude the potential impacts, in some cases unpredictably. And that&#8217;s really what we want to avoid. And hence, what we need to be doing in the longer term is to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause the problem, so that we can bring the temperature down to 2 degrees or below and not to 4 degrees, where we are headed.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Michael Oppenheimer, could you comment on what Dr. Saleemul Huq said, especially the significance and likely impact of a possible 4-degree change in temperature, which is where we &#39;e headed if present emissions aren&#39;t reduced? And also speak specifically about what this report says about the issue of food production and security.
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER : OK, let me comment specifically on a couple of aspects of the report, which are important from the point of view of what will affect human beings. And for the first time, we have evidence that the climate changes, which we knew were happening, are actually affecting the welfare of humans. And I&#8217;ll give you two examples.
Number one, crop yields, which for a long time had been growing at the rate of 10 or 15 percent per decade and managing, therefore, to keep up with population changes and also dietary changes—people eating up the food chain—those gains have slowed and, in many areas, have been reversed, with crop yields actually decreasing in some areas. In fact, many more decreasing—crop yields decreasing in many more areas than areas where they&#8217;re increasing. And that&#8217;s a worrisome trend. And unless there are major changes in technologies—for instance, introducing genetically modified organisms or improved crops—we&#8217;re just going to have a growing shortfall between the demand and the supply of food. That&#8217;s going to lead to increasing malnutrition and perhaps starvation in some areas as the decades progress in the century.
The other interesting area is that human health is being directly affected. There are more area—there are more cases now of people dying from heat-related death related to climate change than are being saved by the warmer winters. So we&#8217;re having more heat-related deaths tied to climate change than we are benefiting from the warmer winters. Together, that presents a very difficult picture, because we are sure—we are sure that heat waves, intense heat are going to increase as we go into the future.
Those are just two examples of how, as we move from a slightly warmer world of today to—as Saleem said, a 2-degree Celsius warmer world—to a 4-degree Celsius warmer world, eventually things spin out of our control. We had better reduce the emissions that are causing the problem, while at the same time getting better at adapting to climate change, because we&#8217;re stuck with some of it.
AMY GOODMAN : Tim Gore, you&#8217;re with a nongovernmental organization, with Oxfam. You&#8217;re head of the Food and Climate Justice division of Oxfam. Talk about what this means and where justice fits into the whole issue of climate change.
TIM GORE : Sure. Well, both Saleem and Michael have outlined some of the areas of the report that we are most concerned about, as well, particularly the impacts on food and the impacts on hunger. And Saleem is absolutely right. What&#8217;s really different about this report is that it&#8217;s saying this isn&#8217;t just an issue for the future. The future projections are worrying enough, but what&#8217;s really significant here is that the report is saying that this thing—these impacts are happening now. We can already see the impact on crop yields, as Michael was saying.
But the report also is clear that we can already see the impacts of climate change on food prices. So in the years since the last IPCC report was released in 2007, we&#8217;ve seen several instances of extreme food price volatility. And each of those have been connected in some way to extreme weather events which are hitting harvests in big crop-producing areas, whether in the U.S., in Russia or in Australia and so on. And that&#8217;s a very different picture of how climate change is impacting on food than we&#8217;ve had in the past. We&#8217;ve long said that climate change is a problem for poor farmers in developing countries that don&#8217;t have the resources that they need to cope with changing seasons, changing rainfall patterns, increasing temperatures, but what we&#8217;re hearing now is that climate change is a problem for global agriculture. It&#8217;s having global implications, including on food prices. And for Oxfam, that&#8217;s a big problem, because we know that people that spend upwards of 50 percent of their incomes on food are the ones that get really badly affected when prices rise so rapidly. And that&#8217;s just a foretaste of what we can expect in the future if we don&#8217;t get a grip on climate change.
AMY GOODMAN : Tim Gore is—
TIM GORE : You asked about it being a justice problem, and I would just say that, for us, it&#8217;s intrinsically a question of justice, because not only is it the inequalities in wealth and power which are driving climate change, it&#8217;s the fossil fuel industry which is making absolutely no bones about the fact that it&#8217;s going to continue to burn fossil fuels at a rate of knots, driving greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and driving this problem. That&#8217;s a problem of inequality of wealth and power of those corporations. But it&#8217;s also—it&#8217;s the poorest, it&#8217;s the least vulnerable [ sic ] that are ill-prepared to cope and are going to—are already feeling those impacts first and worst. And so, if anything, climate change is set to increase the inequalities that we see on this planet, and that really is a worrying picture for us.
AMY GOODMAN : Tim Gore is with Oxfam. They just put out a report called &quot;Hot and Hungry&quot; on the first day of the IPCC meeting in Yokohama, Japan. We are also joined by Saleemul Huq and Michael Oppenheimer, both co-authors of the newly released [Intergovernmental] Panel on Climate Change report . We&#8217;ll come back to them in a moment.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : &quot;The History of Climate Change Negotiations in 83 Seconds.&quot; And for our radio listeners, you can go to our website at democracynow.org to see the whole 83 seconds. Yes, this is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. As we talk about the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report , let&#8217;s go back to the recent U.N. climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, in 2013. We spoke with Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu , the former chair of the Africa Group at the U.N. climate change negotiations from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mpanu spoke about developed countries&#8217; obligations to address the impacts of climate change.
TOSI MPANU - MPANU : Well, it&#8217;s certainly not charity. I think it&#8217;s rather something along the lines of compensation, because runaway climate change is putting one billion Africans in harm&#8217;s way. Today those Africans have to go through adverse effect of a global phenomenon that they didn&#8217;t create. It&#8217;s actually creating not only droughts, floods; it&#8217;s creating conflicts, because people have to go further and further to get some water, and other people are not just welcoming them. So, Mr. Jones can drive two SUVs in the U.S., while a poor African is fighting to get some water. So it&#8217;s about doing what&#8217;s right. And it has to be done in two ways: to reduce their lifestyles, the consumption of carbon, in the North, and to provide some resources so that we can deal with the climate change phenomenon which was imposed on us.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to get the comments of our guests today, Saleemul Huq and Michael Oppenheimer. Michael Oppenheimer, professor at Princeton University, and Saleemul Huq, both are co-authors of the newly released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report . We&#8217;re also joined in Sweden by Tim Gore of Oxfam. Saleemul Huq in London, if you can talk about the effect of climate change on the least-developed countries, sticking with this theme of how this increases disparity in the world?
SALEEMUL HUQ : That&#8217;s absolutely right. As you heard from Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, poor countries have been hit hardest by the impacts of climate change and are already seeing those impacts. And there&#8217;s a group of poorest countries in the world called the least-developed countries, which are 50 of the poorest countries in the world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, but also in Asia, including my country, Bangladesh, and these countries are recognized to be the most vulnerable. And there are obligations that the rich world have taken on to support them and help them. They have made pledges of funding, but they haven&#8217;t met those pledges fully yet, so that&#8217;s one aspect that they need to do.
On the other hand, one of the recent, if you like, new outcomes from the Fifth Assessment Report is that these countries aren&#8217;t sitting idle. They&#8217;re actually going ahead and trying to adapt to the potential impacts of climate change and the ones that they&#8217;re seeing. I&#8217;ll give you the example of my country, Bangladesh. Bangladesh has a very far-reaching climate change strategy and action plan. They&#8217;re putting in the order of a half-a-billion dollars of their own money into implementing it. At the same time, they&#8217;re asking for international donors to match that, and they&#8217;ve matched it to about half that level. But the country is not sitting idle; they&#8217;re going ahead at community level, at national level, at sector level. And so are a number of other least-developed countries. So, in many ways, the least-developed countries are actually leading the world in trying to find ways to tackle the impacts of climate change and adapt. But there is a limit to what they can do. As I said, perhaps up to 2 degrees, they can do it, but beyond that, it&#8217;s going to be much more difficult.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : I want to go back to comments that our Oxfam guest, Tim Gore, made about fossil fuels. The largest oil and gas company in the world, ExxonMobil, just released a report after the IPCC report this week, saying that climate policies are, quote, &quot;highly unlikely&quot; to stop it from producing and selling fossil fuels in the near future. ExxonMobil&#8217;s report says, quote, &quot;We believe producing these assets is essential to meeting growing energy demand worldwide, and in preventing consumers—especially those in the least developed and most vulnerable economies—from themselves becoming stranded in the global pursuit of higher living standards and greater economic opportunity.&quot; That&#8217;s a report from ExxonMobil released after the IPCC report came out this week. So, Michael Oppenheimer, could I get you to comment first on the impact of fossil fuels and what this means?
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER : Well, first of all, the problem is caused, by and large, by burning coal, oil and, to a lesser extent, natural gas—the fossil fuels, which, by and large, power our society. It&#8217;s rather interesting that Exxon felt compelled to make any statement about it at all. What they&#8217;ve done in the past is fund groups to kick up a smokescreen of contrarian science—or contrarian non-science—to confuse the public. I think the company is slowly coming around to realizing that that won&#8217;t do much good over the long term. This is a problem that has to be grappled with. On the other hand, I don&#8217;t expect Exxon to say, &quot;We&#8217;re going to give up the oil business.&quot; That is their business, after all. The question is: How are they going to position themselves with respect to particular U.S. political initiatives which will eventually happen again, like the bill in Congress in 2009 that was aimed at controlling emissions? Are they going to oppose President Obama&#8217;s efforts to use his regulatory authority to control emissions? Those are the key questions. The rest of it is rhetoric.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, talking about that politics, I mean, the House has approved a measure that would effectively force government agencies to stop studying climate change. The measure calls on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and related bodies to focus on forecasting severe weather, but not exploring one of its likely causes. I&#8217;m wondering if you could address this and the overall climate, if you will, in the United States—you&#8217;re a professor at Princeton University—around this pushback on whether humans are causing climate change?
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER : Well, first of all, that&#8217;s clearly an ostrich-head-in-the-sand policy: If you pretend you can&#8217;t see it, then it&#8217;s not happening. And it doesn&#8217;t—isn&#8217;t going to do us any good, obviously. It isn&#8217;t going to stop climate change. And it&#8217;s symptomatic of, unfortunately, an attitude that we&#8217;ve seen in parts, particularly the House of Representatives, you know, where people just don&#8217;t believe in science. And that&#8217;s something that has to change, or else we can never effectively grapple not only with this problem, but a whole raft of issues in our very highly technological society. You know, what the future holds in that regard, it&#8217;s hard to tell. I&#8217;m not the first one to point out to you that this country is polarized terrifically politically. This is a problem which, if it&#8217;s going to be solved, goes to the root of our energy system. We need a bipartisan approach to solving it. And the political rhetoric and the political inaction, that is freezing everything these days, really gets in the way.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Tim Gore, before we continue, I&#8217;d like you to talk about some of the work that Oxfam has done and its experience with people on the ground dealing with the impact of climate change. You&#8217;ve spoken specifically about an irrigation project in Zimbabwe, for instance. Could you talk about the impact already being felt in many parts of the world as a consequence of climate change?
TIM GORE : Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Oxfam is working in many countries right around the world already grappling with those impacts, with small-scale farmers across sub-Saharan Africa, working with them to understand how the seasons are changing, what that means for their cropping patterns, helping them to think about different seeds, different planting regimes, helping with small-scale irrigation schemes. Actually, in Bangladesh, in Saleem&#8217;s country, Oxfam is doing a lot of work on early warning systems to make sure that fisherfolk and other people living in highly vulnerable areas, essentially below sea level, get the information that they need about incoming storm surges or cyclones, so that they can get out of harm&#8217;s way in time. So, I think, as Saleem says, there&#8217;s a whole raft of action that is going on now in some of the poorest countries to try to adapt to climate change. And that&#8217;s very welcome, and we&#8217;re working on that in partnership with many other organizations.
But as Saleem has also said, there are real limits here to what the poorest countries can do on their own. You only have to look at the amount of money that rich countries are spending on adaptation. In the U.S., for example, I think the Congress approved something like $60 billion for the recovery efforts following Hurricane Sandy in New York. I mean, those are the orders of magnitude that we&#8217;re talking about in terms of dealing with this problem. Another example from the U.S. is the amount of money that—public money that&#8217;s currently being spent to support farmers in the U.S. to deal with climate impacts or to insure their crops, something on the order of a billion or so—for a billion dollars of public money going in to support the insurance schemes that protect farmers in the U.S. in the wake of losses like we&#8217;ve seen from the droughts in 2012 or currently ongoing in California. Now, that&#8217;s—those are huge sums of money, of public money, being invested by rich countries in their own protection, their own adaptation, their own preparedness for climate impacts. Poorest—the poorest countries on the planet simply don&#8217;t have those resources to draw upon. They are investing some of their money, but they need more support from the international community, from the rich countries that, in the end, have emitted most of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And it&#8217;s they that are responsible for providing some of that money to make sure that the poorest people, who are least responsible for this problem, get the kinds of resources that they need to adapt.
And the example that you gave from Zimbabwe is important, because it&#8217;s an example, actually, of the limits to adaptation. And although we can do a lot and we must do a lot to adapt to climate change, we&#8217;re also starting to see already in some instances that there are limits to adaptation. You can&#8217;t adapt to any types of climate impacts. And that particular example in Zimbabwe is of an irrigation scheme where it helps the local community to deal with more erratic rainfall, but when you get very extreme droughts, the water table drops so low that there is not enough water pressure to get water into the system. And it just goes to highlight that in the end, although we must increase our efforts to adapt very rapidly, unless we also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the levels of global warming we&#8217;re going to see will also surpass our adaptive capacities within the next two, three, four decades. And so, it&#8217;s absolutely critical that we scale up adaptation, but at the same time we drive down greenhouse gas emissions. That&#8217;s the only way to protect the poorest people on the planet from going hungry because of climate change.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to a report released the same day as the IPCC report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, or NIPCC . The study was funded completely by the Heartland Institute, a think tank that&#8217;s systematically questioned climate change. This is what the report had to say about global warming: quote, &quot;A modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperature-related events. More lives are saved by global warming via the amelioration of cold-related deaths than those lost under excessive heat. Global warming will have a negligible influence on human morbidity and the spread of infectious diseases, a phenomenon observed in virtually all parts of the world,&quot; they said. Tim Gore, can you comment on this pushback, but also talk about the kind of momentum, if there is momentum, leading not just to Peru next year, but the binding summit that will take place in Paris in 2015? The Heartland Institute may not be significant in the world, but in the United States it&#8217;s part of that force that&#8217;s trying to prevent any kind of binding action on climate change.
TIM GORE : Yeah, and this is—you know, goes back to the problem of corporations like Exxon, the powerful economic interests that are currently profiting from our high-carbon economic model and that stand to lose the most from a transition to a low-carbon, fair alternative. And, you know, we know that, when you can track the financing from those groups into groups like the Heartland Institute and others that are lobbying the U.S. government, lobbying interests also in Brussels, trying to prevent the European Union from taking more ambitious action on climate change, lobbying in the Australian context, as well, and are behind many of the more aggressive steps that the Australian government has taken on climate change in recent months, as well. So, this is an incestuous influence of the fossil fuel industry. We&#8217;re seeing it in our planet politics all around the world, and it&#8217;s working directly against the interests of the poorest and the most vulnerable people on the planet, who are already being impacted by climate change.
And we have to stand up to that. And I think that&#8217;s why you&#8217;re seeing an increasing movement starting to build, starting to swell, with strong roots there in the U.S. around divestment, around starting to say, actually, if we want to get serious about tackling this problem, there&#8217;s no question of a partnership with some of these energy companies. They simply don&#8217;t have any interest in seeing climate change tackled. What we have to do is we have to get the money, the investment, out of those companies and into cleaner, sustainable, renewable energy alternatives.
AMY GOODMAN : Saleemul Huq, we just—
TIM GORE : And that, I think—
AMY GOODMAN : We just have 15 seconds, if you could comment from London on that point of where you&#8217;re going from here? And, Michael Oppenheimer, 15 seconds, as well.
SALEEMUL HUQ : Well, I think, you know, to cite the example of the fossil fuel companies that you mentioned, it&#8217;s like they are the drug suppliers to the rest of the world who are junkies and are hooked on fossil fuels. But we don&#8217;t have to remain hooked on fossil fuels. Indeed, we are going to have to cut ourselves off from them if we want to see a real transition and prevent the kinds of temperature rises that I mentioned, up to 4 degrees. The only way is to wean ourselves off the fossil fuels that we use at the moment.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor Oppenheimer?
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER : I just want to point out it&#8217;s not just a problem for the rest of the world. Just think about Hurricane Sandy. Think about how hard it was to deal with that storm. That&#8217;s today&#8217;s storms. Think about what happens over the next 10, 20, 30 years, when sea level goes up and the storms, in all cases—in most cases, get worse.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to thank you all for being with us. Michael Oppenheimer and Saleemul Huq, both co-authors of the newly released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report . And thank you so much to Tim Gore of Oxfam, speaking to us from Sweden.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, Dragnet Nation . Stay with us. NERMEENSHAIKH: The United Nations’ top climate body has warned that human-driven climate change has impacted every corner of the globe, with the poorest suffering the worst effects. In its latest report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says greenhouse gases have driven up global temperatures and extreme weather, while threatening sources of food and water.

And the worst is yet to come. The report declared, quote, "Throughout the 21st century, climate-change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hot spots of hunger." Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, said nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change.

RAJENDRAPACHAURI: There is a reason for the world not really neglecting the findings of this report, because they are profound. And let me repeat once again, we have said very categorically in this report, the implications for human security. We have reasons to believe that if the world doesn’t do anything about mitigating the emissions of greenhouse gases and the extent of climate change continues to increase, then the very social stability of human systems could be at stake.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re joined now by three guests. Here in New York, Michael Oppenheimer is with us, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. He’s one of the main authors of the 32-volume report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In London, Saleemul Huq joins us, a climate scientist at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, also the director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. He’s the lead author of one of the chapters in the just-released IPCC report.

And Tim Gore is head of policy for Food and Climate Justice at Oxfam. He was a civil society observer at the recent IPCC meeting in Yokohama, Japan, joining us by Democracy Now! video stream from Sweden.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Saleemul Huq in London. Can you talk about the significance of this report, how it differs from the previous report and the warning that it represents in the world?

SALEEMULHUQ: Well, it’s made a significant new finding since the last report seven years ago, in that we now have very, very strong evidence of climate change actually happening all over the world on—both on land as well as in the oceans, which we didn’t have the last time around. So there’s no question that it’s already happening and we’re living in a climate-changed world already. It then goes on to make projections into the future and says that if we continue to warm at the rate that we are now, we’re heading for 4 degrees or above by the end of the century, and that is really a catastrophic scenario in terms of the potential impacts that are likely to happen. Even at a lower temperature of 2 degrees, we can still possibly manage, but there will be significant losses in certain parts of the world of ecosystems and, indeed, human lives, as well.

AMYGOODMAN: And that 2 percent, just explain for—we have a global audience, but, of course, we have a lot of Americans here, and the 2 percent is more—2 degrees, rather.

SALEEMULHUQ: Sure. Well, it’s 2 degrees centigrade, which is over three-and-a-half degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s the temperature threshold at which the global leaders in countries around the world have agreed that we need to stay below that, under which we can probably manage to cope with the impacts in most parts of the world, although even that will be difficult in some parts of the world. But if we go well above that to 4 degrees, which is where we are headed at the moment, then we would not only double, but we increase by orders of magnitude the potential impacts, in some cases unpredictably. And that’s really what we want to avoid. And hence, what we need to be doing in the longer term is to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause the problem, so that we can bring the temperature down to 2 degrees or below and not to 4 degrees, where we are headed.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Michael Oppenheimer, could you comment on what Dr. Saleemul Huq said, especially the significance and likely impact of a possible 4-degree change in temperature, which is where we 'e headed if present emissions aren't reduced? And also speak specifically about what this report says about the issue of food production and security.

MICHAELOPPENHEIMER: OK, let me comment specifically on a couple of aspects of the report, which are important from the point of view of what will affect human beings. And for the first time, we have evidence that the climate changes, which we knew were happening, are actually affecting the welfare of humans. And I’ll give you two examples.

Number one, crop yields, which for a long time had been growing at the rate of 10 or 15 percent per decade and managing, therefore, to keep up with population changes and also dietary changes—people eating up the food chain—those gains have slowed and, in many areas, have been reversed, with crop yields actually decreasing in some areas. In fact, many more decreasing—crop yields decreasing in many more areas than areas where they’re increasing. And that’s a worrisome trend. And unless there are major changes in technologies—for instance, introducing genetically modified organisms or improved crops—we’re just going to have a growing shortfall between the demand and the supply of food. That’s going to lead to increasing malnutrition and perhaps starvation in some areas as the decades progress in the century.

The other interesting area is that human health is being directly affected. There are more area—there are more cases now of people dying from heat-related death related to climate change than are being saved by the warmer winters. So we’re having more heat-related deaths tied to climate change than we are benefiting from the warmer winters. Together, that presents a very difficult picture, because we are sure—we are sure that heat waves, intense heat are going to increase as we go into the future.

Those are just two examples of how, as we move from a slightly warmer world of today to—as Saleem said, a 2-degree Celsius warmer world—to a 4-degree Celsius warmer world, eventually things spin out of our control. We had better reduce the emissions that are causing the problem, while at the same time getting better at adapting to climate change, because we’re stuck with some of it.

AMYGOODMAN: Tim Gore, you’re with a nongovernmental organization, with Oxfam. You’re head of the Food and Climate Justice division of Oxfam. Talk about what this means and where justice fits into the whole issue of climate change.

TIMGORE: Sure. Well, both Saleem and Michael have outlined some of the areas of the report that we are most concerned about, as well, particularly the impacts on food and the impacts on hunger. And Saleem is absolutely right. What’s really different about this report is that it’s saying this isn’t just an issue for the future. The future projections are worrying enough, but what’s really significant here is that the report is saying that this thing—these impacts are happening now. We can already see the impact on crop yields, as Michael was saying.

But the report also is clear that we can already see the impacts of climate change on food prices. So in the years since the last IPCC report was released in 2007, we’ve seen several instances of extreme food price volatility. And each of those have been connected in some way to extreme weather events which are hitting harvests in big crop-producing areas, whether in the U.S., in Russia or in Australia and so on. And that’s a very different picture of how climate change is impacting on food than we’ve had in the past. We’ve long said that climate change is a problem for poor farmers in developing countries that don’t have the resources that they need to cope with changing seasons, changing rainfall patterns, increasing temperatures, but what we’re hearing now is that climate change is a problem for global agriculture. It’s having global implications, including on food prices. And for Oxfam, that’s a big problem, because we know that people that spend upwards of 50 percent of their incomes on food are the ones that get really badly affected when prices rise so rapidly. And that’s just a foretaste of what we can expect in the future if we don’t get a grip on climate change.

AMYGOODMAN: Tim Gore is—

TIMGORE: You asked about it being a justice problem, and I would just say that, for us, it’s intrinsically a question of justice, because not only is it the inequalities in wealth and power which are driving climate change, it’s the fossil fuel industry which is making absolutely no bones about the fact that it’s going to continue to burn fossil fuels at a rate of knots, driving greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and driving this problem. That’s a problem of inequality of wealth and power of those corporations. But it’s also—it’s the poorest, it’s the least vulnerable [sic] that are ill-prepared to cope and are going to—are already feeling those impacts first and worst. And so, if anything, climate change is set to increase the inequalities that we see on this planet, and that really is a worrying picture for us.

AMYGOODMAN: Tim Gore is with Oxfam. They just put out a report called "Hot and Hungry" on the first day of the IPCC meeting in Yokohama, Japan. We are also joined by Saleemul Huq and Michael Oppenheimer, both co-authors of the newly released [Intergovernmental] Panel on Climate Change report. We’ll come back to them in a moment.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: "The History of Climate Change Negotiations in 83 Seconds." And for our radio listeners, you can go to our website at democracynow.org to see the whole 83 seconds. Yes, this is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. As we talk about the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, let’s go back to the recent U.N. climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, in 2013. We spoke with Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, the former chair of the Africa Group at the U.N. climate change negotiations from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mpanu spoke about developed countries’ obligations to address the impacts of climate change.

TOSIMPANU-MPANU: Well, it’s certainly not charity. I think it’s rather something along the lines of compensation, because runaway climate change is putting one billion Africans in harm’s way. Today those Africans have to go through adverse effect of a global phenomenon that they didn’t create. It’s actually creating not only droughts, floods; it’s creating conflicts, because people have to go further and further to get some water, and other people are not just welcoming them. So, Mr. Jones can drive two SUVs in the U.S., while a poor African is fighting to get some water. So it’s about doing what’s right. And it has to be done in two ways: to reduce their lifestyles, the consumption of carbon, in the North, and to provide some resources so that we can deal with the climate change phenomenon which was imposed on us.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to get the comments of our guests today, Saleemul Huq and Michael Oppenheimer. Michael Oppenheimer, professor at Princeton University, and Saleemul Huq, both are co-authors of the newly released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. We’re also joined in Sweden by Tim Gore of Oxfam. Saleemul Huq in London, if you can talk about the effect of climate change on the least-developed countries, sticking with this theme of how this increases disparity in the world?

SALEEMULHUQ: That’s absolutely right. As you heard from Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, poor countries have been hit hardest by the impacts of climate change and are already seeing those impacts. And there’s a group of poorest countries in the world called the least-developed countries, which are 50 of the poorest countries in the world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, but also in Asia, including my country, Bangladesh, and these countries are recognized to be the most vulnerable. And there are obligations that the rich world have taken on to support them and help them. They have made pledges of funding, but they haven’t met those pledges fully yet, so that’s one aspect that they need to do.

On the other hand, one of the recent, if you like, new outcomes from the Fifth Assessment Report is that these countries aren’t sitting idle. They’re actually going ahead and trying to adapt to the potential impacts of climate change and the ones that they’re seeing. I’ll give you the example of my country, Bangladesh. Bangladesh has a very far-reaching climate change strategy and action plan. They’re putting in the order of a half-a-billion dollars of their own money into implementing it. At the same time, they’re asking for international donors to match that, and they’ve matched it to about half that level. But the country is not sitting idle; they’re going ahead at community level, at national level, at sector level. And so are a number of other least-developed countries. So, in many ways, the least-developed countries are actually leading the world in trying to find ways to tackle the impacts of climate change and adapt. But there is a limit to what they can do. As I said, perhaps up to 2 degrees, they can do it, but beyond that, it’s going to be much more difficult.

NERMEENSHAIKH: I want to go back to comments that our Oxfam guest, Tim Gore, made about fossil fuels. The largest oil and gas company in the world, ExxonMobil, just released a report after the IPCC report this week, saying that climate policies are, quote, "highly unlikely" to stop it from producing and selling fossil fuels in the near future. ExxonMobil’s report says, quote, "We believe producing these assets is essential to meeting growing energy demand worldwide, and in preventing consumers—especially those in the least developed and most vulnerable economies—from themselves becoming stranded in the global pursuit of higher living standards and greater economic opportunity." That’s a report from ExxonMobil released after the IPCC report came out this week. So, Michael Oppenheimer, could I get you to comment first on the impact of fossil fuels and what this means?

MICHAELOPPENHEIMER: Well, first of all, the problem is caused, by and large, by burning coal, oil and, to a lesser extent, natural gas—the fossil fuels, which, by and large, power our society. It’s rather interesting that Exxon felt compelled to make any statement about it at all. What they’ve done in the past is fund groups to kick up a smokescreen of contrarian science—or contrarian non-science—to confuse the public. I think the company is slowly coming around to realizing that that won’t do much good over the long term. This is a problem that has to be grappled with. On the other hand, I don’t expect Exxon to say, "We’re going to give up the oil business." That is their business, after all. The question is: How are they going to position themselves with respect to particular U.S. political initiatives which will eventually happen again, like the bill in Congress in 2009 that was aimed at controlling emissions? Are they going to oppose President Obama’s efforts to use his regulatory authority to control emissions? Those are the key questions. The rest of it is rhetoric.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, talking about that politics, I mean, the House has approved a measure that would effectively force government agencies to stop studying climate change. The measure calls on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and related bodies to focus on forecasting severe weather, but not exploring one of its likely causes. I’m wondering if you could address this and the overall climate, if you will, in the United States—you’re a professor at Princeton University—around this pushback on whether humans are causing climate change?

MICHAELOPPENHEIMER: Well, first of all, that’s clearly an ostrich-head-in-the-sand policy: If you pretend you can’t see it, then it’s not happening. And it doesn’t—isn’t going to do us any good, obviously. It isn’t going to stop climate change. And it’s symptomatic of, unfortunately, an attitude that we’ve seen in parts, particularly the House of Representatives, you know, where people just don’t believe in science. And that’s something that has to change, or else we can never effectively grapple not only with this problem, but a whole raft of issues in our very highly technological society. You know, what the future holds in that regard, it’s hard to tell. I’m not the first one to point out to you that this country is polarized terrifically politically. This is a problem which, if it’s going to be solved, goes to the root of our energy system. We need a bipartisan approach to solving it. And the political rhetoric and the political inaction, that is freezing everything these days, really gets in the way.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Tim Gore, before we continue, I’d like you to talk about some of the work that Oxfam has done and its experience with people on the ground dealing with the impact of climate change. You’ve spoken specifically about an irrigation project in Zimbabwe, for instance. Could you talk about the impact already being felt in many parts of the world as a consequence of climate change?

TIMGORE: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Oxfam is working in many countries right around the world already grappling with those impacts, with small-scale farmers across sub-Saharan Africa, working with them to understand how the seasons are changing, what that means for their cropping patterns, helping them to think about different seeds, different planting regimes, helping with small-scale irrigation schemes. Actually, in Bangladesh, in Saleem’s country, Oxfam is doing a lot of work on early warning systems to make sure that fisherfolk and other people living in highly vulnerable areas, essentially below sea level, get the information that they need about incoming storm surges or cyclones, so that they can get out of harm’s way in time. So, I think, as Saleem says, there’s a whole raft of action that is going on now in some of the poorest countries to try to adapt to climate change. And that’s very welcome, and we’re working on that in partnership with many other organizations.

But as Saleem has also said, there are real limits here to what the poorest countries can do on their own. You only have to look at the amount of money that rich countries are spending on adaptation. In the U.S., for example, I think the Congress approved something like $60 billion for the recovery efforts following Hurricane Sandy in New York. I mean, those are the orders of magnitude that we’re talking about in terms of dealing with this problem. Another example from the U.S. is the amount of money that—public money that’s currently being spent to support farmers in the U.S. to deal with climate impacts or to insure their crops, something on the order of a billion or so—for a billion dollars of public money going in to support the insurance schemes that protect farmers in the U.S. in the wake of losses like we’ve seen from the droughts in 2012 or currently ongoing in California. Now, that’s—those are huge sums of money, of public money, being invested by rich countries in their own protection, their own adaptation, their own preparedness for climate impacts. Poorest—the poorest countries on the planet simply don’t have those resources to draw upon. They are investing some of their money, but they need more support from the international community, from the rich countries that, in the end, have emitted most of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And it’s they that are responsible for providing some of that money to make sure that the poorest people, who are least responsible for this problem, get the kinds of resources that they need to adapt.

And the example that you gave from Zimbabwe is important, because it’s an example, actually, of the limits to adaptation. And although we can do a lot and we must do a lot to adapt to climate change, we’re also starting to see already in some instances that there are limits to adaptation. You can’t adapt to any types of climate impacts. And that particular example in Zimbabwe is of an irrigation scheme where it helps the local community to deal with more erratic rainfall, but when you get very extreme droughts, the water table drops so low that there is not enough water pressure to get water into the system. And it just goes to highlight that in the end, although we must increase our efforts to adapt very rapidly, unless we also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the levels of global warming we’re going to see will also surpass our adaptive capacities within the next two, three, four decades. And so, it’s absolutely critical that we scale up adaptation, but at the same time we drive down greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the only way to protect the poorest people on the planet from going hungry because of climate change.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to a report released the same day as the IPCC report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, or NIPCC. The study was funded completely by the Heartland Institute, a think tank that’s systematically questioned climate change. This is what the report had to say about global warming: quote, "A modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperature-related events. More lives are saved by global warming via the amelioration of cold-related deaths than those lost under excessive heat. Global warming will have a negligible influence on human morbidity and the spread of infectious diseases, a phenomenon observed in virtually all parts of the world," they said. Tim Gore, can you comment on this pushback, but also talk about the kind of momentum, if there is momentum, leading not just to Peru next year, but the binding summit that will take place in Paris in 2015? The Heartland Institute may not be significant in the world, but in the United States it’s part of that force that’s trying to prevent any kind of binding action on climate change.

TIMGORE: Yeah, and this is—you know, goes back to the problem of corporations like Exxon, the powerful economic interests that are currently profiting from our high-carbon economic model and that stand to lose the most from a transition to a low-carbon, fair alternative. And, you know, we know that, when you can track the financing from those groups into groups like the Heartland Institute and others that are lobbying the U.S. government, lobbying interests also in Brussels, trying to prevent the European Union from taking more ambitious action on climate change, lobbying in the Australian context, as well, and are behind many of the more aggressive steps that the Australian government has taken on climate change in recent months, as well. So, this is an incestuous influence of the fossil fuel industry. We’re seeing it in our planet politics all around the world, and it’s working directly against the interests of the poorest and the most vulnerable people on the planet, who are already being impacted by climate change.

And we have to stand up to that. And I think that’s why you’re seeing an increasing movement starting to build, starting to swell, with strong roots there in the U.S. around divestment, around starting to say, actually, if we want to get serious about tackling this problem, there’s no question of a partnership with some of these energy companies. They simply don’t have any interest in seeing climate change tackled. What we have to do is we have to get the money, the investment, out of those companies and into cleaner, sustainable, renewable energy alternatives.

AMYGOODMAN: Saleemul Huq, we just—

TIMGORE: And that, I think—

AMYGOODMAN: We just have 15 seconds, if you could comment from London on that point of where you’re going from here? And, Michael Oppenheimer, 15 seconds, as well.

SALEEMULHUQ: Well, I think, you know, to cite the example of the fossil fuel companies that you mentioned, it’s like they are the drug suppliers to the rest of the world who are junkies and are hooked on fossil fuels. But we don’t have to remain hooked on fossil fuels. Indeed, we are going to have to cut ourselves off from them if we want to see a real transition and prevent the kinds of temperature rises that I mentioned, up to 4 degrees. The only way is to wean ourselves off the fossil fuels that we use at the moment.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor Oppenheimer?

MICHAELOPPENHEIMER: I just want to point out it’s not just a problem for the rest of the world. Just think about Hurricane Sandy. Think about how hard it was to deal with that storm. That’s today’s storms. Think about what happens over the next 10, 20, 30 years, when sea level goes up and the storms, in all cases—in most cases, get worse.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us. Michael Oppenheimer and Saleemul Huq, both co-authors of the newly released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. And thank you so much to Tim Gore of Oxfam, speaking to us from Sweden.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, Dragnet Nation. Stay with us.

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Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0400Washington State Vote to Label GM Food Defeated By Corporations' "Sophisticated Propaganda Machine"http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/8/washington_state_vote_to_label_gm
tag:democracynow.org,2013-11-08:en/story/9f3e32 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end the show with this week&#8217;s vote in Washington state against a measure that would have required mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods. Washington would have been the first state to pass a law on GMO labeling. The campaign over Initiative 522 drew millions of dollars from out of state and was the costliest initiative fight in state history. Major corporations and other opponents of GMO labeling spent $22 million to defeat the measure. Monsanto donated over $5 million; DuPont, $4 million; while Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Nestle dedicated more than $1.5 million each. The opposition outspent supporters about three to one.
AMY GOODMAN : Meanwhile, a recent New York Times poll found 93 percent of Americans want labels on food containing GMOs. Sixty-four countries require it.
For more on the implications of this vote, we go to San Francisco, where we&#8217;re joined by David Bronner. He is the grandson of Dr. Bronner who founded Dr. Bronner&#8217;s Magic Soaps, which was the largest donor to Yes on 522 campaign. David Bronner has been the president of the company since 1998.
David, welcome to Democracy Now! How much did Dr. Bronner&#8217;s contribute?
DAVID BRONNER : We contributed $2.3 million to the &quot;yes&quot; side. Yeah, we knew—we knew that—you know, what the other side was going to do and that we had to step in and help—
AMY GOODMAN : Why was—
DAVID BRONNER : —you know, an amazing grassroots coalition there, be able to fight these guys.
AMY GOODMAN : Why is this debate so important to you—the labeling of GMO foods—and what are the lessons you&#8217;ve learned from this campaign battle?
DAVID BRONNER : Well, you know, basically, six chemical companies have bought the seed industry in this country and are engineering resistance to their weed killer. So when you hear with genetic engineering, oftentimes it&#8217;ll be spun like it&#8217;s going to be, you know, vitamins in rice or nitrogen fixing, but that&#8217;s not the reality. The reality on the ground is it&#8217;s about chemical companies selling weed killer.
And, you know, most of these crops, 80 percent of the genetically engineered acreage, is engineered to resist Roundup, which is Monsanto&#8217;s leading weed killer. Overuse of this weed killer is now resulting in super weeds that are resistant to and aren&#8217;t being killed by normal doses or applications, so ever more weed killer is being poured onto our fields. Next-generation genetically engineered crops in the pipeline are being engineered to resist dicamba and 2,4-D. These are much more toxic weed killers. They&#8217;re older, much more toxic. 2,4-D is the main ingredient in Agent Orange, which coincidentally both Monsanto and Dow also manufactured.
You know, this is the exact wrong direction as a society we should be going in. We need to be getting off the chemical treadmill. And genetically engineered—genetic engineering, as applied, is basically doubling down on this, you know, unsustainable chemical model of industrial agriculture.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, given the fact that the public does want the right to know, on labeling of GMO products, why are the chemical companies—what arguments are they able to use in initiatives like what happened in Washington to defeat these measures?
DAVID BRONNER : Well, it&#8217;s kind of the classic playbook on the &quot;no&quot; side of, you know, the big money corporations. What they&#8217;ll—they don&#8217;t really take on the right to know. You know, that&#8217;s a big loser for them. But it&#8217;s—they&#8217;ll kind of raise these false specters of, you know, &quot;Your food costs are going to go up by $500 a family,&quot; you know, that this initiative is written poorly and is a bureaucratic nightmare. You know, this is kind of like the &quot;no&quot; side playbook. You know, just you don&#8217;t really take on the issue; you just say, &quot;Well, this might be a good idea, but this initiative is terrible.&quot; And, you know, they just kind of manipulate people&#8217;s fears and kind of take away their confidence in voting for their own interests. You know, it&#8217;s a very sophisticated propaganda machine. I mean, $22 million in a state like Washington, I mean, you cannot turn around without being bombarded with their garbage—
AMY GOODMAN : Former Washington State—
DAVID BRONNER : —you know, and it was being layered with mailers.
AMY GOODMAN : David, former Washington State Attorney General Ken Eikenberry said in an ad opposed to 522 it would provide misleading information on food to consumers. I want to go to that clip.
KEN EIKENBERRY : I worked to protect consumers from misleading product information. That&#8217;s why I oppose Initiative 522. It would require some foods to be labeled as genetically engineered even if they&#8217;re not. But it gives special exemptions to many foods that contain or are made with GE products. That&#8217;s the exact opposite of truth in labeling. It would give consumers misleading information about the foods they buy. I urge a &quot;no&quot; vote.
AMY GOODMAN : What about the—what about those charges, David Bronner? That was former Washington State Attorney General Ken Eikenberry.
DAVID BRONNER : Yeah, and Republican. You know, it&#8217;s ridiculous. Basically, the disclosure of genetic engineering would apply to all foods that currently have to disclose ingredients and nutrition information, and doesn&#8217;t apply to foods that don&#8217;t. It just follows general federal labeling guidelines. And if we don&#8217;t, we&#8217;re going to get preempted. We can&#8217;t—you know, when he&#8217;s saying we&#8217;re exempting foods, well, what&#8217;s being exempted? Like restaurant food, you know, stuff that isn&#8217;t labeled. You don&#8217;t label—you know, you don&#8217;t label your—you know, when you order out at a restaurant, that&#8217;s not labeled. And, you know, they&#8217;re making hay, like, oh, we&#8217;re exempting restaurant food. And it&#8217;s like, well, we don&#8217;t label restaurant food.
AMY GOODMAN : David, we only have 30 seconds. My question is: Where do you go from here? Are there other such campaign battles going on around the country?
DAVID BRONNER : Yeah, there&#8217;s 26 states considering legislative—or pursuing legislative strategies. Both Connecticut and Maine have labeling laws that will trigger as soon as five other states enact labeling. And also, Washington is not—it&#8217;s not done yet. It&#8217;s an all-mail ballot. Ballots are still being—our votes are still being counted. We&#8217;re up to like two to one. The late surge, you know, especially from King County, the Seattle center—you know, the urban central—I mean, we&#8217;re starting to see two to one come in. And, you know, we&#8217;re up to 47 percent now. I mean, we may yet close this out with a victory in Washington state.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, we will continue to follow it, certainly. David Bronner, thanks for joining us, helped fund the Yes on 522 campaign, grandson of Dr. Bronner, who founded Dr. Bronner&#8217;s Magic Soaps. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end the show with this week’s vote in Washington state against a measure that would have required mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods. Washington would have been the first state to pass a law on GMO labeling. The campaign over Initiative 522 drew millions of dollars from out of state and was the costliest initiative fight in state history. Major corporations and other opponents of GMO labeling spent $22 million to defeat the measure. Monsanto donated over $5 million; DuPont, $4 million; while Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Nestle dedicated more than $1.5 million each. The opposition outspent supporters about three to one.

AMYGOODMAN: Meanwhile, a recent New York Times poll found 93 percent of Americans want labels on food containing GMOs. Sixty-four countries require it.

For more on the implications of this vote, we go to San Francisco, where we’re joined by David Bronner. He is the grandson of Dr. Bronner who founded Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, which was the largest donor to Yes on 522 campaign. David Bronner has been the president of the company since 1998.

David, welcome to Democracy Now! How much did Dr. Bronner’s contribute?

DAVIDBRONNER: We contributed $2.3 million to the "yes" side. Yeah, we knew—we knew that—you know, what the other side was going to do and that we had to step in and help—

AMYGOODMAN: Why was—

DAVIDBRONNER: —you know, an amazing grassroots coalition there, be able to fight these guys.

AMYGOODMAN: Why is this debate so important to you—the labeling of GMO foods—and what are the lessons you’ve learned from this campaign battle?

DAVIDBRONNER: Well, you know, basically, six chemical companies have bought the seed industry in this country and are engineering resistance to their weed killer. So when you hear with genetic engineering, oftentimes it’ll be spun like it’s going to be, you know, vitamins in rice or nitrogen fixing, but that’s not the reality. The reality on the ground is it’s about chemical companies selling weed killer.

And, you know, most of these crops, 80 percent of the genetically engineered acreage, is engineered to resist Roundup, which is Monsanto’s leading weed killer. Overuse of this weed killer is now resulting in super weeds that are resistant to and aren’t being killed by normal doses or applications, so ever more weed killer is being poured onto our fields. Next-generation genetically engineered crops in the pipeline are being engineered to resist dicamba and 2,4-D. These are much more toxic weed killers. They’re older, much more toxic. 2,4-D is the main ingredient in Agent Orange, which coincidentally both Monsanto and Dow also manufactured.

You know, this is the exact wrong direction as a society we should be going in. We need to be getting off the chemical treadmill. And genetically engineered—genetic engineering, as applied, is basically doubling down on this, you know, unsustainable chemical model of industrial agriculture.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, given the fact that the public does want the right to know, on labeling of GMO products, why are the chemical companies—what arguments are they able to use in initiatives like what happened in Washington to defeat these measures?

DAVIDBRONNER: Well, it’s kind of the classic playbook on the "no" side of, you know, the big money corporations. What they’ll—they don’t really take on the right to know. You know, that’s a big loser for them. But it’s—they’ll kind of raise these false specters of, you know, "Your food costs are going to go up by $500 a family," you know, that this initiative is written poorly and is a bureaucratic nightmare. You know, this is kind of like the "no" side playbook. You know, just you don’t really take on the issue; you just say, "Well, this might be a good idea, but this initiative is terrible." And, you know, they just kind of manipulate people’s fears and kind of take away their confidence in voting for their own interests. You know, it’s a very sophisticated propaganda machine. I mean, $22 million in a state like Washington, I mean, you cannot turn around without being bombarded with their garbage—

AMYGOODMAN: Former Washington State—

DAVIDBRONNER: —you know, and it was being layered with mailers.

AMYGOODMAN: David, former Washington State Attorney General Ken Eikenberry said in an ad opposed to 522 it would provide misleading information on food to consumers. I want to go to that clip.

KENEIKENBERRY: I worked to protect consumers from misleading product information. That’s why I oppose Initiative 522. It would require some foods to be labeled as genetically engineered even if they’re not. But it gives special exemptions to many foods that contain or are made with GE products. That’s the exact opposite of truth in labeling. It would give consumers misleading information about the foods they buy. I urge a "no" vote.

AMYGOODMAN: What about the—what about those charges, David Bronner? That was former Washington State Attorney General Ken Eikenberry.

DAVIDBRONNER: Yeah, and Republican. You know, it’s ridiculous. Basically, the disclosure of genetic engineering would apply to all foods that currently have to disclose ingredients and nutrition information, and doesn’t apply to foods that don’t. It just follows general federal labeling guidelines. And if we don’t, we’re going to get preempted. We can’t—you know, when he’s saying we’re exempting foods, well, what’s being exempted? Like restaurant food, you know, stuff that isn’t labeled. You don’t label—you know, you don’t label your—you know, when you order out at a restaurant, that’s not labeled. And, you know, they’re making hay, like, oh, we’re exempting restaurant food. And it’s like, well, we don’t label restaurant food.

AMYGOODMAN: David, we only have 30 seconds. My question is: Where do you go from here? Are there other such campaign battles going on around the country?

DAVIDBRONNER: Yeah, there’s 26 states considering legislative—or pursuing legislative strategies. Both Connecticut and Maine have labeling laws that will trigger as soon as five other states enact labeling. And also, Washington is not—it’s not done yet. It’s an all-mail ballot. Ballots are still being—our votes are still being counted. We’re up to like two to one. The late surge, you know, especially from King County, the Seattle center—you know, the urban central—I mean, we’re starting to see two to one come in. And, you know, we’re up to 47 percent now. I mean, we may yet close this out with a victory in Washington state.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we will continue to follow it, certainly. David Bronner, thanks for joining us, helped fund the Yes on 522 campaign, grandson of Dr. Bronner, who founded Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps.

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Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0500As Lawmakers Target Food Stamp Funding, New Report Finds 1 in 6 in U.S. Are Going Hungryhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/30/as_lawmakers_target_food_stamp_funding
tag:democracynow.org,2013-05-30:en/story/dd479d JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the silent crisis of hunger in America today. According to a new report , one in six Americans live in a household that cannot afford adequate food despite residing in one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Of these 50 million individuals, nearly 17 million are children. The report was just released by the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University&#8217;s School of Law, and it&#8217;s called &quot;Nourishing Change: Fulfilling the Right to Food in the United States.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : According to the report, food insecurity in the United States has rocketed—skyrocketed since the economic downturn, with an additional 14 million people classified as food insecure in 2011 than in 2007. The report comes as Congress is renegotiating the farm bill and proposing serious cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP , formerly known as the Food Stamp Program. Millions of Americans currently rely on the program to feed themselves and their families. The authors of the new report are calling on the U.S. government to strengthen such critical programs and ensure all Americans have access to sufficient, nutritious food.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A recent documentary called A Place at the Table shows the struggles of families facing food insecurity. That means they don&#8217;t know where their next meal is coming from.
FOOD INSECURE MOTHER : I&#8217;m struggling so much every day to be able to even feed my kids. Hunger isn&#8217;t just someone in Africa that&#8217;s real skinny, and you can see their ribs. It&#8217;s right here in the United States.
JEFF BRIDGES : One in four of our children are living in food insecure homes? That doesn&#8217;t—it just doesn&#8217;t make any sense at all.
FOOD INSECURE MOTHER : I used to read pizzeria menus to get rid of my hunger pains, just so I can be able to feed my children.
FOOD INSECURE GIRL : I struggle a lot. It&#8217;s because I&#8217;m hungry, or my stomach is really hurting.
DR. MARIANA CHILTON : There&#8217;s a huge disconnect between the people who are suffering and the people who can do something about it.
REP . JIM McGOVERN: We are the richest, most prosperous nation in the world, and yet we still haven&#8217;t found the political will to end hunger.
DR. MARIANA CHILTON : The answer is: Focus on the human being.
DR. LARRY BROWN : There&#8217;s something wrong when we have all of that knowledge and information, and nobody is doing a damn thing about it.
AMY GOODMAN : That was an excerpt from A Place at the Table , a documentary on the silent crisis of hunger in America that first premiered at Sundance a year ago. Well, for more on the latest news, we&#8217;re joined by Smita Narula, the faculty director of the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU&#8217;s School of Law, co-author of this new report, &quot;Nourishing Change.&quot;
Tell us about these findings.
SMITA NARULA : Sure. As you&#8217;ve mentioned, we&#8217;re facing a serious food insecurity crisis in the country today. Of the 50 million people who are food insecure, 17 million are considered as having very low food security. And what this means is that people are regularly reducing the size of their meals, skipping meals altogether, and in some cases going entire days without eating. Our report finds that the key nutrition assistance programs which represent the government&#8217;s response to food insecurity are failing to address this crisis adequately, and instead of shoring up these programs, Congress is now threatening deep cuts to SNAP , or the Food Stamp Program, which threatens to push millions of Americans into deeper crisis.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, what about this network of programs, a safety net the government has, not only the Food Stamp Program, but the WIC program, the free lunch—School Lunch Program, the free breakfast programs? How well are they tackling the problem right now?
SMITA NARULA : These programs are incredibly vital to millions of Americans, and they have tremendous reach, but our report finds that they fall short in three key respects. First, the eligibility requirements for these programs, which are often drawn along income and asset lines, are simply drawn too narrowly, so these programs are not reaching all food insecure households. Second, numerous burdensome certification, renewal and verification processes are deterring applicants from applying altogether. And, finally, the amount of benefits that are provided by these programs are simply insufficient to meet a family&#8217;s food-related needs.
To give you an example, a family of four entitled to the maximum SNAP benefit can only provide $1.90 per person per meal under those benefits. That&#8217;s less than $24 a day to feed an entire family. There are two things that are wrong with that number. One, it doesn&#8217;t stretch until the end of the month, and people end up lining up at food pantries. And second, it&#8217;s also insufficient to ensure nutritious food, and many people turn to junk food, which is much more cheaper and more readily available in this country.
AMY GOODMAN : The heart of your report are the pictures and testimonies. Describe some of them.
SMITA NARULA : Sure. These pictures, which were given to us courtesy of MAZON : A Jewish Response to Hunger, they put real faces on the crisis of food insecurity in this country. Take, for example, the story of John, who&#8217;s a 10-year-old from Michigan. John wishes that he could get a job and bring some income home, so that he doesn&#8217;t have to see his parents push food off their plates and onto his plate any longer. When he goes to school, his gnawing hunger keeps him from concentrating, and his food—sorry, his grades have plummeted. The family is now on SNAP , and John is on the School Lunch Programs, as a result of which things have improved. But if the House version of the bill goes through, then he&#8217;ll be one of possibly 200,000 children who will no longer be eligible for those school meals.
Then you have the story of someone like Rhonda. Rhonda lost—Rhonda&#8217;s father lost his job, and her mother has a medical condition. And she had to forego going to college in order to make ends meet in the family. They lost their SNAP benefits because they couldn&#8217;t keep up with the burdensome paperwork while their mother was in the hospital, and now they have to make choices between paying for food or paying for medical bills. And Rhonda&#8217;s parents ask her and her sister all the time, &quot;Would you rather have the electricity back on, or do you want running water today?&quot; That&#8217;s what food insecurity looks like. It looks like hard choices in America.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One of the main programmatic proposals you make is to begin reframing this whole issue of food as a human right. And could you talk about that?
SMITA NARULA : Sure. The world over, freedom from hunger and access to sufficient nutritious food is recognized as a basic fundamental human right. And these values are not foreign to the United States. The U.S. government, going as far back as the FDR era, actually has been promoting freedom from want, and it was that desire during the Great Depression that led to the inclusion of the right to food in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We&#8217;re calling on America to reclaim those values to ensure that all houses have access to sufficient and nutritious food and that nobody struggles to put food on the table.
AMY GOODMAN : On Capitol Hill, lawmakers in both chambers are moving to drastically cut the nation&#8217;s Food Stamp Program through the farm bill. In the Democratic-controlled Senate, the Agriculture Committee has approved proposal by Republican Senator David Vitter to drop permanently anyone convicted of a violent crime from ever getting food stamps. Meanwhile, the House Agriculture Committee has approved $20 billion in cuts to the Food Stamps Program over the next decade. The cuts could result in nearly two million people losing access to food stamps and 200,000 schoolchildren losing free school lunches. One of the most vocal supporters for cutting the budget for food stamps has been Republican Congressmember Steve King of Iowa. He recently claimed President Obama is trying to expand what he called &quot;the dependency class.&quot;
REP . STEVE KING : We want to take care of the people that are needy or the people that are hungry, and we&#8217;ve watched this program grow from a number that I think I first memorized when I arrived here in Congress at about 19 million people, now about 49 million people. And it appears to me that the goal of this administration is to expand the rolls of people that are on SNAP benefits. And their purpose for doing so, in part, is because of what the gentleman has said from Massachusetts. Another purpose for that, though, is just to simply expand the dependency class.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Congressmember Steve King, a Republican of Iowa. Your response, Smita?
SMITA NARULA : This is unfortunately part of the political discourse that attaches significant stigma and shame to participants in food assistance programs, which actually deters many people from applying altogether. It also represents policies that are completely backwards, in our view. Instead of gutting the food safety net, we need to be fortifying it. An investment in food security is an investment in education, it&#8217;s an investment in health, and it&#8217;s an investment in economic recovery. Study after study shows that children who are food insecure struggle to learn at the same rates as their food secure peers. They have lifelong health problems. And ultimately, it undermines their earning potential. The Center for American Progress also notes that hunger is extremely expensive for American society and costs America $167.5 billion a year in medical costs and in running private emergency food programs, among other costs. Conversely, expanding SNAP to actually cover all food insecure households costs only half as much.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you, about a minute that we have left, there&#8217;s been a lot of focus on children in the program, but also the elderly are a growing source of benefiting from the Food Stamp Program because their Social Security or retirement income is not sufficient to lift them into an adequate living standard. Could you talk about the impact on the elderly?
SMITA NARULA : Sure. And this actually points to something that&#8217;s become very true of the SNAP program. Not only is it the largest nutrition assistance program in the country, but it&#8217;s also serving as now the largest anti-poverty program in the country. As the social safety net has been shredded over the last several years, the elderly, the disabled and so many others are increasingly relying on SNAP . So, cutting the legs under SNAP threatens to push the elderly and many others into even deeper crisis and poverty.
AMY GOODMAN : Sequester? What effect has it had?
SMITA NARULA : So, it&#8217;s already had the effect of pulling funds away from these programs, and we see, just when we speak to individuals right here in New York City, food pantries, that it&#8217;s having a real impact on people&#8217;s daily lives. We spoke to many customers lining up right here in New York City at food pantries saying that things are getting worse and worse, that even the slightest difference and changes in benefits can push a family from being able to feed itself into poverty and into struggling to putting food on the table.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, most important recommendation?
SMITA NARULA : Most important recommendation is to strengthen, rather than undermine, the food safety net. We need to fill the plugs in these programs rather than gutting them. And America needs to adopt a national strategy for ensuring the right to food for all Americans. And the time to do that is now, when Americans need it most.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to thank you very much, Smita Narula, for joining us, faculty director of the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU&#8217;s School of Law. She co-authored the report , &quot;Nourishing Change: Fulfilling the Right to Food in the United States.&quot; We&#8217;ll link to it at democracynow.org. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the silent crisis of hunger in America today. According to a new report, one in six Americans live in a household that cannot afford adequate food despite residing in one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Of these 50 million individuals, nearly 17 million are children. The report was just released by the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University’s School of Law, and it’s called "Nourishing Change: Fulfilling the Right to Food in the United States."

AMYGOODMAN: According to the report, food insecurity in the United States has rocketed—skyrocketed since the economic downturn, with an additional 14 million people classified as food insecure in 2011 than in 2007. The report comes as Congress is renegotiating the farm bill and proposing serious cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program. Millions of Americans currently rely on the program to feed themselves and their families. The authors of the new report are calling on the U.S. government to strengthen such critical programs and ensure all Americans have access to sufficient, nutritious food.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A recent documentary called A Place at the Table shows the struggles of families facing food insecurity. That means they don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

FOODINSECUREMOTHER: I’m struggling so much every day to be able to even feed my kids. Hunger isn’t just someone in Africa that’s real skinny, and you can see their ribs. It’s right here in the United States.

JEFFBRIDGES: One in four of our children are living in food insecure homes? That doesn’t—it just doesn’t make any sense at all.

FOODINSECUREMOTHER: I used to read pizzeria menus to get rid of my hunger pains, just so I can be able to feed my children.

FOODINSECUREGIRL: I struggle a lot. It’s because I’m hungry, or my stomach is really hurting.

DR. MARIANACHILTON: There’s a huge disconnect between the people who are suffering and the people who can do something about it.

REP. JIM McGOVERN: We are the richest, most prosperous nation in the world, and yet we still haven’t found the political will to end hunger.

DR. MARIANACHILTON: The answer is: Focus on the human being.

DR. LARRYBROWN: There’s something wrong when we have all of that knowledge and information, and nobody is doing a damn thing about it.

AMYGOODMAN: That was an excerpt from A Place at the Table, a documentary on the silent crisis of hunger in America that first premiered at Sundance a year ago. Well, for more on the latest news, we’re joined by Smita Narula, the faculty director of the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU’s School of Law, co-author of this new report, "Nourishing Change."

Tell us about these findings.

SMITANARULA: Sure. As you’ve mentioned, we’re facing a serious food insecurity crisis in the country today. Of the 50 million people who are food insecure, 17 million are considered as having very low food security. And what this means is that people are regularly reducing the size of their meals, skipping meals altogether, and in some cases going entire days without eating. Our report finds that the key nutrition assistance programs which represent the government’s response to food insecurity are failing to address this crisis adequately, and instead of shoring up these programs, Congress is now threatening deep cuts to SNAP, or the Food Stamp Program, which threatens to push millions of Americans into deeper crisis.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, what about this network of programs, a safety net the government has, not only the Food Stamp Program, but the WIC program, the free lunch—School Lunch Program, the free breakfast programs? How well are they tackling the problem right now?

SMITANARULA: These programs are incredibly vital to millions of Americans, and they have tremendous reach, but our report finds that they fall short in three key respects. First, the eligibility requirements for these programs, which are often drawn along income and asset lines, are simply drawn too narrowly, so these programs are not reaching all food insecure households. Second, numerous burdensome certification, renewal and verification processes are deterring applicants from applying altogether. And, finally, the amount of benefits that are provided by these programs are simply insufficient to meet a family’s food-related needs.

To give you an example, a family of four entitled to the maximum SNAP benefit can only provide $1.90 per person per meal under those benefits. That’s less than $24 a day to feed an entire family. There are two things that are wrong with that number. One, it doesn’t stretch until the end of the month, and people end up lining up at food pantries. And second, it’s also insufficient to ensure nutritious food, and many people turn to junk food, which is much more cheaper and more readily available in this country.

AMYGOODMAN: The heart of your report are the pictures and testimonies. Describe some of them.

SMITANARULA: Sure. These pictures, which were given to us courtesy of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, they put real faces on the crisis of food insecurity in this country. Take, for example, the story of John, who’s a 10-year-old from Michigan. John wishes that he could get a job and bring some income home, so that he doesn’t have to see his parents push food off their plates and onto his plate any longer. When he goes to school, his gnawing hunger keeps him from concentrating, and his food—sorry, his grades have plummeted. The family is now on SNAP, and John is on the School Lunch Programs, as a result of which things have improved. But if the House version of the bill goes through, then he’ll be one of possibly 200,000 children who will no longer be eligible for those school meals.

Then you have the story of someone like Rhonda. Rhonda lost—Rhonda’s father lost his job, and her mother has a medical condition. And she had to forego going to college in order to make ends meet in the family. They lost their SNAP benefits because they couldn’t keep up with the burdensome paperwork while their mother was in the hospital, and now they have to make choices between paying for food or paying for medical bills. And Rhonda’s parents ask her and her sister all the time, "Would you rather have the electricity back on, or do you want running water today?" That’s what food insecurity looks like. It looks like hard choices in America.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One of the main programmatic proposals you make is to begin reframing this whole issue of food as a human right. And could you talk about that?

SMITANARULA: Sure. The world over, freedom from hunger and access to sufficient nutritious food is recognized as a basic fundamental human right. And these values are not foreign to the United States. The U.S. government, going as far back as the FDR era, actually has been promoting freedom from want, and it was that desire during the Great Depression that led to the inclusion of the right to food in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We’re calling on America to reclaim those values to ensure that all houses have access to sufficient and nutritious food and that nobody struggles to put food on the table.

AMYGOODMAN: On Capitol Hill, lawmakers in both chambers are moving to drastically cut the nation’s Food Stamp Program through the farm bill. In the Democratic-controlled Senate, the Agriculture Committee has approved proposal by Republican Senator David Vitter to drop permanently anyone convicted of a violent crime from ever getting food stamps. Meanwhile, the House Agriculture Committee has approved $20 billion in cuts to the Food Stamps Program over the next decade. The cuts could result in nearly two million people losing access to food stamps and 200,000 schoolchildren losing free school lunches. One of the most vocal supporters for cutting the budget for food stamps has been Republican Congressmember Steve King of Iowa. He recently claimed President Obama is trying to expand what he called "the dependency class."

REP. STEVEKING: We want to take care of the people that are needy or the people that are hungry, and we’ve watched this program grow from a number that I think I first memorized when I arrived here in Congress at about 19 million people, now about 49 million people. And it appears to me that the goal of this administration is to expand the rolls of people that are on SNAP benefits. And their purpose for doing so, in part, is because of what the gentleman has said from Massachusetts. Another purpose for that, though, is just to simply expand the dependency class.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Congressmember Steve King, a Republican of Iowa. Your response, Smita?

SMITANARULA: This is unfortunately part of the political discourse that attaches significant stigma and shame to participants in food assistance programs, which actually deters many people from applying altogether. It also represents policies that are completely backwards, in our view. Instead of gutting the food safety net, we need to be fortifying it. An investment in food security is an investment in education, it’s an investment in health, and it’s an investment in economic recovery. Study after study shows that children who are food insecure struggle to learn at the same rates as their food secure peers. They have lifelong health problems. And ultimately, it undermines their earning potential. The Center for American Progress also notes that hunger is extremely expensive for American society and costs America $167.5 billion a year in medical costs and in running private emergency food programs, among other costs. Conversely, expanding SNAP to actually cover all food insecure households costs only half as much.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you, about a minute that we have left, there’s been a lot of focus on children in the program, but also the elderly are a growing source of benefiting from the Food Stamp Program because their Social Security or retirement income is not sufficient to lift them into an adequate living standard. Could you talk about the impact on the elderly?

SMITANARULA: Sure. And this actually points to something that’s become very true of the SNAP program. Not only is it the largest nutrition assistance program in the country, but it’s also serving as now the largest anti-poverty program in the country. As the social safety net has been shredded over the last several years, the elderly, the disabled and so many others are increasingly relying on SNAP. So, cutting the legs under SNAP threatens to push the elderly and many others into even deeper crisis and poverty.

AMYGOODMAN: Sequester? What effect has it had?

SMITANARULA: So, it’s already had the effect of pulling funds away from these programs, and we see, just when we speak to individuals right here in New York City, food pantries, that it’s having a real impact on people’s daily lives. We spoke to many customers lining up right here in New York City at food pantries saying that things are getting worse and worse, that even the slightest difference and changes in benefits can push a family from being able to feed itself into poverty and into struggling to putting food on the table.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, most important recommendation?

SMITANARULA: Most important recommendation is to strengthen, rather than undermine, the food safety net. We need to fill the plugs in these programs rather than gutting them. And America needs to adopt a national strategy for ensuring the right to food for all Americans. And the time to do that is now, when Americans need it most.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to thank you very much, Smita Narula, for joining us, faculty director of the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU’s School of Law. She co-authored the report, "Nourishing Change: Fulfilling the Right to Food in the United States." We’ll link to it at democracynow.org.

]]>
Thu, 30 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400Coalition of Immokalee Workers Targets Wendy's in Fair Food Campaign to Improve Wages, Conditionshttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/20/coalition_of_immokalee_workers_targets_wendys
tag:democracynow.org,2013-05-20:en/story/380593 AMY GOODMAN : We begin today&#8217;s show with the latest target in the push for fast-food giants to buy their tomatoes through the Fair Food Campaign organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. So far, McDonald&#8217;s, Subway, Burger King and Taco Bell have all joined the White House-recognized social responsibility program. They have agreed to pay an extra penny per pound of tomatoes to raise wages and only buy from fields where workers&#8217; rights are respected.
Now the delegation of workers has come to New York City to focus on Wendy&#8217;s, one of the highest-earning fast-food chains in the country that&#8217;s so far refused to sign on. Hundreds of protesters joined a delegation of workers from the coalition for protests Saturday at two Wendy&#8217;s locations. This is farm worker and organizer Gerardo Reyes-Chávez.
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: We are here in front of the Wendy&#8217;s. We just had a protest as part of a national weekend of action. And we&#8217;re here in New York because there&#8217;s a lot of—a lot of groups here in New York supporting the Campaign for Fair Food.
AMY GOODMAN : Wendy&#8217;s has nearly 6,600 restaurants in the United States and around the world and ranks second only to McDonald&#8217;s.
Well, as the campaign mounts for the company to join the Fair Food Campaign, this Thursday the fast-food giant holds its annual shareholders meeting here in New York City, where it will again come under pressure. Wendy&#8217;s did not respond to Democracy Now! &#8217;s repeated requests to come on the show or submit a written comment.
But for more, we&#8217;re joined now by Gerardo Reyes-Chávez, the farm worker and organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers you just heard from. He has last joined us on the show in October of last year, just before Chipotle agreed to improve wages and work conditions for those who pick tomatoes used in its products. There, he was in Denver.
Gerardo, welcome back to Democracy Now!
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Thank you. It&#8217;s an honor to be here.
AMY GOODMAN : It&#8217;s great to have you with us. So, what is this campaign all about?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: This campaign is about bringing corporations to establish a different way of doing business. We&#8217;re asking them to be responsible and to pay a premium pay to address the sub-poverty wages that workers have received. Today, for example, a worker receives, for a 32-pound bucket of tomatoes, around 45 to 50 cents. And there&#8217;s been many abuses going on in the fields, like sexual harassment, situations of discrimination, verbal and physical abuse, and many other issues that need to be addressed. In the extreme, there&#8217;s been cases of slavery.
So what we&#8217;re asking corporations to do is to work with us in addressing these issues by conditioning their purchasing on their—what we call the Fair Food Program, which is enclosed in this little booklet that&#8217;s being distributed in every farm now that the tomato industry, represented by the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, have signed an agreement with the coalition to establish all of these new rights because of the market power that&#8217;s behind it. So we&#8217;re asking Wendy&#8217;s to join with us and to work to implement also the Fair Food Program, to work with us in enforcing.
AMY GOODMAN : And who—who created the Fair Food Program?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Oh, that&#8217;s a very good question. The Fair Food Program was created by the worker community. We created the rights, including—included in this booklet, for example, there is the right—the right to have a clock in the fields, because many times when you went to the fields, you had to wait, and that time was not accounted for. Now it has to be. Also, the right to don&#8217;t overfill the bucket, which is a right that represents, cities right now, 10 percent less tomatoes, that before you have to just give for free. The right to work with a committee on health and safety in the fields where you are working, where workers have a voice now in the workplace to talk about how to eliminate threats to their health, their safety, obviously, but also to improve the environment in which you are working.
AMY GOODMAN : Gerardo, you have picked tomatoes for years. Can you talk about your own history?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Yeah. I mean, I have worked picking tomatoes, picking oranges, picking watermelons, to a little bit of everything.
AMY GOODMAN : In Florida?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: In Florida, yeah. My experience, I mean, I have seen bosses taking our money away, not paying us after we&#8217;ve done the work, and because of that, not having a place to live. Then I have to change jobs because of that and started to pick oranges, then came back to tomatoes. So, I&#8217;ve seen many of these abuses going on.
The reason why I met the coalition and become involved in this was because one of the cases that was brought to federal court by the CIW involved workers that became my—some of my best friends, that we became roommates, basically working in this orange company just picking oranges, after they brought this case to court and it was prosecuted. Until now, there&#8217;s been seven cases that have been brought to court. And the amount of workers that have been liberated from this situation ranges around 1,200 workers.
AMY GOODMAN : How did you get these various companies to sign on, like, for example, your more recent victory with Chipotle?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: It&#8217;s basically a collaboration. With the Campaign for Fair Food, we&#8217;re asking people to support us, and there&#8217;s various ways in which people can get involved. We do protests. For example, today, we know there&#8217;s over 12 protests in this weekend. There was 12, around 12—more than 12 protests in the country of different chapters of—and organizations that are supporting what we are doing. We&#8217;re asking also consumers in—when we do presentations in universities, in churches, people visit Immokalee to get to see firsthand—
AMY GOODMAN : Immokalee is in Florida.
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: In Florida, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain where, for people who aren&#8217;t familiar with it.
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: It&#8217;s in the southwest, the southwest part of Florida, and it&#8217;s basically where the heart of the tomato industry is located. The tomato industry have land all over the East Coast. During the months of October—from October to May, we produce around 90 percent of the fresh tomatoes that are produced on U.S. soil. So, when we—when we talk to people, we ask them to stand with us—not to solve our problem, not to come with a strategy from outside. The strategy is created by the community. And we&#8217;re asking people to stand in solidarity. And it&#8217;s worked.
AMY GOODMAN : A recent report by the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights, they conducted a 10-day fact-finding mission to the United States. It found that &quot;With a few exceptions, most companies still struggle to understand the implications of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. Those that do have policies in place, in turn face the challenge of turning such policies into effective practices.&quot; Gerardo, this finding—
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: It is—
AMY GOODMAN : —and how you get these corporations to accept? I mean, it&#8217;s interesting that this—your whole campaign has been endorsed by President Obama. He recently singled out the Coalition of Immokalee Fair Food Program in a new report, calling it &quot;one of the most successful and innovative programs&quot; addressing and actively changing the conditions of modern-day slavery.
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Yeah. To us, it&#8217;s an honor, and it&#8217;s the result of a lot of work that has gone into the campaign. And, I mean, we have, in some of these cases, got to work undercover, help people escape, and just work to bring these cases to light and to justice. We don&#8217;t want to be pursuing more and more of these cases. And the reason why it was—this program was recognized in the work against slavery is because this program created market consequences, the zero-tolerance policy. If a company is found with a case of slavery happening on their premises, the buyers that have signed, they have to cut purchases immediately. So that creates an incentive for the entire industry to work in implementing in the best possible way the rights that are included under this program, to eliminate the possibilities of slavery to continue to exist.
AMY GOODMAN : So, as we wrap up, Wendy&#8217;s—have they responded to your campaign? We tried to get a comment from them; we weren&#8217;t able to.
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: We also tried. We went to different stores. On Saturday, we had different delegations, and then we had the march. We asked to talk to the managers, and it seems that they were instructed not to talk to us, not to receive anything from us. And the interesting thing is, Emil Brolick, who used to be the president of Taco Bell and now is the CEO of Wendy&#8217;s, when they signed the agreement, a first agreement for fair food—
AMY GOODMAN : And did he sign the agreement?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Yum! Brands did. But he came out publicly saying, &quot;We&#8217;re willing to play a leadership role within our industry to be a part of the solution.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Because he was part of Wendy&#8217;s at the time?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Because—no, at the time, he was part of Taco Bell. And when they signed, when Yum! Brands signed for Taco Bell, he said, &quot;We hope others in the restaurant industry and supermarket retail trade will follow our leadership.&quot; It was the right decision back then. And now, with 11 corporations on board, with most of the tomato companies on board, it is only the better—if it was a right decision back then, it is much more right right now.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us. What are you going to do around the Wendy&#8217;s annual shareholders meeting?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: We are going to have a presence outside, and we&#8217;re inviting media. The most important part is the presence, because we want to let the shareholders know that this campaign is going to continue until they talk about it within their meetings. And—
AMY GOODMAN : Where is the meeting taking place here?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: The meeting is going to be at the Sofitel Hotel on 45th—
AMY GOODMAN : In Midtown Manhattan.
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Forty-five in Midtown Manhattan, yeah. And we are also asking people to sign the petition that some of us is driving. They can do it by visiting our website, which is ciw-online.org . And until now, there&#8217;s around 87,000 people that have signed. So, we hope that listeners and viewers can participate on this, too.
AMY GOODMAN : Who next, after Wendy&#8217;s?
GERARDO REYES -CHÁVEZ: Well, there&#8217;s some campaigns going on, inviting Kroger, inviting other buyers from the supermarket industry.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you, Gerardo Reyes-Chávez, farm worker, organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, here in New York City for Wendy&#8217;s annual shareholders meeting.
This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . We&#8217;ll be back on climate change in a minute. AMYGOODMAN: We begin today’s show with the latest target in the push for fast-food giants to buy their tomatoes through the Fair Food Campaign organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. So far, McDonald’s, Subway, Burger King and Taco Bell have all joined the White House-recognized social responsibility program. They have agreed to pay an extra penny per pound of tomatoes to raise wages and only buy from fields where workers’ rights are respected.

Now the delegation of workers has come to New York City to focus on Wendy’s, one of the highest-earning fast-food chains in the country that’s so far refused to sign on. Hundreds of protesters joined a delegation of workers from the coalition for protests Saturday at two Wendy’s locations. This is farm worker and organizer Gerardo Reyes-Chávez.

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: We are here in front of the Wendy’s. We just had a protest as part of a national weekend of action. And we’re here in New York because there’s a lot of—a lot of groups here in New York supporting the Campaign for Fair Food.

AMYGOODMAN: Wendy’s has nearly 6,600 restaurants in the United States and around the world and ranks second only to McDonald’s.

Well, as the campaign mounts for the company to join the Fair Food Campaign, this Thursday the fast-food giant holds its annual shareholders meeting here in New York City, where it will again come under pressure. Wendy’s did not respond to Democracy Now!’s repeated requests to come on the show or submit a written comment.

But for more, we’re joined now by Gerardo Reyes-Chávez, the farm worker and organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers you just heard from. He has last joined us on the show in October of last year, just before Chipotle agreed to improve wages and work conditions for those who pick tomatoes used in its products. There, he was in Denver.

Gerardo, welcome back to Democracy Now!

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.

AMYGOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. So, what is this campaign all about?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: This campaign is about bringing corporations to establish a different way of doing business. We’re asking them to be responsible and to pay a premium pay to address the sub-poverty wages that workers have received. Today, for example, a worker receives, for a 32-pound bucket of tomatoes, around 45 to 50 cents. And there’s been many abuses going on in the fields, like sexual harassment, situations of discrimination, verbal and physical abuse, and many other issues that need to be addressed. In the extreme, there’s been cases of slavery.

So what we’re asking corporations to do is to work with us in addressing these issues by conditioning their purchasing on their—what we call the Fair Food Program, which is enclosed in this little booklet that’s being distributed in every farm now that the tomato industry, represented by the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, have signed an agreement with the coalition to establish all of these new rights because of the market power that’s behind it. So we’re asking Wendy’s to join with us and to work to implement also the Fair Food Program, to work with us in enforcing.

AMYGOODMAN: And who—who created the Fair Food Program?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Oh, that’s a very good question. The Fair Food Program was created by the worker community. We created the rights, including—included in this booklet, for example, there is the right—the right to have a clock in the fields, because many times when you went to the fields, you had to wait, and that time was not accounted for. Now it has to be. Also, the right to don’t overfill the bucket, which is a right that represents, cities right now, 10 percent less tomatoes, that before you have to just give for free. The right to work with a committee on health and safety in the fields where you are working, where workers have a voice now in the workplace to talk about how to eliminate threats to their health, their safety, obviously, but also to improve the environment in which you are working.

AMYGOODMAN: Gerardo, you have picked tomatoes for years. Can you talk about your own history?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Yeah. I mean, I have worked picking tomatoes, picking oranges, picking watermelons, to a little bit of everything.

AMYGOODMAN: In Florida?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: In Florida, yeah. My experience, I mean, I have seen bosses taking our money away, not paying us after we’ve done the work, and because of that, not having a place to live. Then I have to change jobs because of that and started to pick oranges, then came back to tomatoes. So, I’ve seen many of these abuses going on.

The reason why I met the coalition and become involved in this was because one of the cases that was brought to federal court by the CIW involved workers that became my—some of my best friends, that we became roommates, basically working in this orange company just picking oranges, after they brought this case to court and it was prosecuted. Until now, there’s been seven cases that have been brought to court. And the amount of workers that have been liberated from this situation ranges around 1,200 workers.

AMYGOODMAN: How did you get these various companies to sign on, like, for example, your more recent victory with Chipotle?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: It’s basically a collaboration. With the Campaign for Fair Food, we’re asking people to support us, and there’s various ways in which people can get involved. We do protests. For example, today, we know there’s over 12 protests in this weekend. There was 12, around 12—more than 12 protests in the country of different chapters of—and organizations that are supporting what we are doing. We’re asking also consumers in—when we do presentations in universities, in churches, people visit Immokalee to get to see firsthand—

AMYGOODMAN: Immokalee is in Florida.

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: In Florida, yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: Explain where, for people who aren’t familiar with it.

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: It’s in the southwest, the southwest part of Florida, and it’s basically where the heart of the tomato industry is located. The tomato industry have land all over the East Coast. During the months of October—from October to May, we produce around 90 percent of the fresh tomatoes that are produced on U.S. soil. So, when we—when we talk to people, we ask them to stand with us—not to solve our problem, not to come with a strategy from outside. The strategy is created by the community. And we’re asking people to stand in solidarity. And it’s worked.

AMYGOODMAN: A recent report by the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights, they conducted a 10-day fact-finding mission to the United States. It found that "With a few exceptions, most companies still struggle to understand the implications of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. Those that do have policies in place, in turn face the challenge of turning such policies into effective practices." Gerardo, this finding—

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: It is—

AMYGOODMAN: —and how you get these corporations to accept? I mean, it’s interesting that this—your whole campaign has been endorsed by President Obama. He recently singled out the Coalition of Immokalee Fair Food Program in a new report, calling it "one of the most successful and innovative programs" addressing and actively changing the conditions of modern-day slavery.

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Yeah. To us, it’s an honor, and it’s the result of a lot of work that has gone into the campaign. And, I mean, we have, in some of these cases, got to work undercover, help people escape, and just work to bring these cases to light and to justice. We don’t want to be pursuing more and more of these cases. And the reason why it was—this program was recognized in the work against slavery is because this program created market consequences, the zero-tolerance policy. If a company is found with a case of slavery happening on their premises, the buyers that have signed, they have to cut purchases immediately. So that creates an incentive for the entire industry to work in implementing in the best possible way the rights that are included under this program, to eliminate the possibilities of slavery to continue to exist.

AMYGOODMAN: So, as we wrap up, Wendy’s—have they responded to your campaign? We tried to get a comment from them; we weren’t able to.

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: We also tried. We went to different stores. On Saturday, we had different delegations, and then we had the march. We asked to talk to the managers, and it seems that they were instructed not to talk to us, not to receive anything from us. And the interesting thing is, Emil Brolick, who used to be the president of Taco Bell and now is the CEO of Wendy’s, when they signed the agreement, a first agreement for fair food—

AMYGOODMAN: And did he sign the agreement?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Yum! Brands did. But he came out publicly saying, "We’re willing to play a leadership role within our industry to be a part of the solution."

AMYGOODMAN: Because he was part of Wendy’s at the time?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Because—no, at the time, he was part of Taco Bell. And when they signed, when Yum! Brands signed for Taco Bell, he said, "We hope others in the restaurant industry and supermarket retail trade will follow our leadership." It was the right decision back then. And now, with 11 corporations on board, with most of the tomato companies on board, it is only the better—if it was a right decision back then, it is much more right right now.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us. What are you going to do around the Wendy’s annual shareholders meeting?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: We are going to have a presence outside, and we’re inviting media. The most important part is the presence, because we want to let the shareholders know that this campaign is going to continue until they talk about it within their meetings. And—

AMYGOODMAN: Where is the meeting taking place here?

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: The meeting is going to be at the Sofitel Hotel on 45th—

AMYGOODMAN: In Midtown Manhattan.

GERARDOREYES-CHÁVEZ: Forty-five in Midtown Manhattan, yeah. And we are also asking people to sign the petition that some of us is driving. They can do it by visiting our website, which is ciw-online.org. And until now, there’s around 87,000 people that have signed. So, we hope that listeners and viewers can participate on this, too.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you, Gerardo Reyes-Chávez, farm worker, organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, here in New York City for Wendy’s annual shareholders meeting.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll be back on climate change in a minute.

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Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400Michael Pollan on How Reclaiming Cooking Can Save Our Food System, Make Us Healthy & Grow Democracyhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/6/michael_pollan_on_how_reclaiming_cooking
tag:democracynow.org,2013-05-06:en/story/5f1eea AMY GOODMAN : We spend the hour today with one of the country&#8217;s leading writers and thinkers on food and food policy: Michael Pollan. He has written several best-selling books about food, including The Omnivore&#8217;s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater&#8217;s Manifesto . He has just written a new book called Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation . In the book, Michael Pollan argues taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make our food system healthier and more sustainable. Michael Pollan is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism. He joined me in New York when his book was released just a week ago. I started by asking him about the journey he took in writing Cooked .
MICHAEL POLLAN : It was probably the most fun I&#8217;ve ever had as a writer. And it&#8217;s hard to describe it as work exactly. When I figured out what I wanted to do, which was kind of drive cooking back to its most elemental reality, I decided to apprentice myself to a series of masters. And I divided it into four essential transformations that—you know, kind of the common denominator of all cooking: fire, cooking with fire, you know, the oldest; water, which is to say cooking in pots, which comes much later in history and involves a whole different set of ways of transferring heat; air, for baking; and earth, for fermentation. And so, in each case, I found somebody or a couple somebodies who were really good at the mastery of that element, and I worked for them, you know, a number of shifts, a number of events, and—or lessons, and just kind of acquired these skills that I had never had before.
AMY GOODMAN : So tell us about your trip to North Carolina, to the barbecue maker.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, I wanted to start with fire because fire is where cooking starts, probably two million years ago, according to the current thinking, which is before, of course, we were Homo sapiens . We were still Homo erectus at that point. And when we acquired the control of fire and the ability to cook meat especially over fire, but other things, as well, we unlocked this treasure trove of calories, of energy, that other animals didn&#8217;t have, because when you cook food, you basically predigest it outside of the body, so you don&#8217;t have to use as much energy—your body doesn&#8217;t have to use as much energy to break it down. You don&#8217;t have to chew it as much. And it&#8217;s a huge boon, and it probably led to the larger brain that we have compared to other apes our size, and the smaller gut—although we seem intent on enlarging that gut right now.
But so I figured what was the—what was the cooking most like that? And it was whole-hog barbecue as practiced in eastern North Carolina. You know, barbecue is very balkanized, and every region in the South has very different rules on what constitutes barbecue and an abhorrence of all other forms of barbecue, which they won&#8217;t even call barbecue. So I went to North Carolina, to eastern North Carolina, and I worked with a man named Ed Mitchell, who is a pretty well-known pitmaster, African American, who&#8217;s been at it for many, many years, after being a Vietnam vet and working as a Ford—in the Ford dealership network. And I went—we did a couple barbecues, where we cooked these whole pigs over wood and very slowly, and then we had these amazing public events, where you have to take an entire pig and chop it up, mix it with various spices and vinegar, and turn it into sandwiches. It&#8217;s actually remarkably simple kind of cooking. It&#8217;s like pig, heat, wood, time. That&#8217;s the whole recipe. But you need a whole pig, and you have to be able to move it around, which is a little tricky.
What I liked about Ed is, unlike almost every other pitmaster I could find, he cared about the pigs and where they came from. Barbecue is an incredibly democratic food. It&#8217;s cheaper than McDonald&#8217;s in many places and far more delicious. On the other hand, the only reason it can be that cheap is they use commodity hogs, the worst of the worst, which is—you know, it&#8217;s an industry kind of ruining North Carolina. Ed Mitchell is a little different in that he really cares where the hogs come from. And in fact he&#8217;s paid a price for that with the industry. And—
AMY GOODMAN : In what way?
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, you know, they—when he started kind of evangelizing about using small farmers&#8217; hogs raised outdoors, all of a sudden he had tax audits and prosecutions for various business practices. And, you know, no one&#8217;s been able to prove the quid pro quo , but the timing is awfully suspicious. And he lost one of his restaurants because of this initiative against him.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain what his concern was about commodity hogs.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, you know, hogs today are raised indoors in brutal conditions in these confinement—CAFOs—confinement operations. They&#8217;re—the sows live in little cages too narrow for them ever to turn around in their entire lives, because they don&#8217;t want them to crush their babies, and it just makes it easier to inseminate them, which they do over and over and over again. And these pigs, you know, go crazy gradually. I mean, I&#8217;ve written about this before, and that&#8217;s one of the reasons I had trouble celebrating barbecue that wasn&#8217;t in some sense humane or sustainable. And Ed has figured out how to do it. And, of course, he has to charge $9 or $10 for a sandwich. Other places charge $3. But on the other hand, it&#8217;s a whole meal, so I don&#8217;t begrudge him that price.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain how he does it.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, Ed does whole hog exclusively. He thinks the way they do it over in, you know, the western part of the state, where they just do pork shoulders, it&#8217;s good, but it&#8217;s not barbecue. And he does it in—over wood and charcoal very slowly. So you—the key to making barbecue is getting the temperature consistent and low, like 200 degrees. None of us cook at 200 degrees. That&#8217;s like a hot tub—I mean, it&#8217;s a hot hot tub. But when you do that, the fat kind of slowly renders into the meat, and the meat gradually breaks down. And after 20 hours or so, you could pull the whole thing apart with a fork, and it&#8217;s really delicious.
AMY GOODMAN : So, you went from fire to?
MICHAEL POLLAN : To water. And, you know, fire cooking is very male. It&#8217;s very—there&#8217;s a lot of self-dramatizing guys doing barbecue, as there still are in every backyard in America. And it&#8217;s very ritualistic and very public and very communal. It has some wonderful and stupid, you know, bombastic qualities.
Cooking in pots is more domestic, traditionally more feminine, more modest. You know, it happens under a lid. You can&#8217;t see what&#8217;s happening. You can&#8217;t watch a pot boil, because it won&#8217;t boil. But it&#8217;s a very important technology, and the second important cooking technology. It comes—doesn&#8217;t happen until about 10,000 years ago, because you need pottery that can hold water and survive heat to start cooking this way. But when you can cook with water, by boiling water, you can soften grains, for example. A revolution happens in human society, because you can feed old people and very young people who don&#8217;t have teeth. So, the elderly live longer as soon as you can boil food, and you can wean babies earlier. So, it&#8217;s a wonderful method for that. And it also allows you to combine plants and meat or just plants. It allows you to eat grain, which you can&#8217;t really eat without water. And it really, you know, was a revolutionary way of cooking.
And I approached it as a lesson, a series of lessons in braising stews and soups. And I worked with this wonderful chef named Samin Nosrat, who is Iranian American, trained at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. And she would come to my house every, you know, couple Sundays, and we&#8217;d make a big meal together. And my wife and son would get involved, and then we&#8217;d invite friends over. And I learned these wonderful lessons from her. And every time, she&#8217;d have a theme. You know, &quot;Today we&#8217;re going to learn about emulsification.&quot; And—
AMY GOODMAN : So, what is emulsification?
MICHAEL POLLAN : Emulsification is basically combining fats and waters in a stable solution, like when you whip eggs or—salad dressing is an emulsification, basically. And how do you get those particles to stay together? Or we do a lesson in the Maillard reaction, which is how, in the presence of heat, amino acids and sugars turn into these wonderful flavor compounds, thousands of them, that makes food much more flavorful, much more allusive. One of the—one of the interesting common denominators of all cooking is that you take these very straightforward given simple flavors, and you complicate them, and you make a food taste like other things. It might taste like—give it the aroma of flowers or, I mean, bacon or—it&#8217;s sort of like poetic language, I mean, basically, you know, where you inflect everyday language into something more heightened and allusive to other things, more metaphorical. And you do that with cooking, too. And so, we worked on that. And these were the most practical skills I learned, the ones I use every day. I love making braises. It&#8217;s incredibly simple, but time-consuming.
AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean by braises?
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, a braise is basically a stew where you don&#8217;t cover the meat, or whatever the central character of your dish is, with liquid. You basically make a mirepoix, which is just a dice of onions and carrots and celery, and you sauté that for as long as you can bear—the longer, the better—and then you add the—you brown your meat, say, if you&#8217;re doing chicken, and you put that in, and then you add a liquid. But you only have the liquid come up an inch or so, and it doesn&#8217;t cover the meat. And what that does is—and you only cook it very slowly, again, like 225 degrees, for as long as you can stand. You know, four hours is better; chicken, you can get away with two hours. And what happens is the—the part that isn&#8217;t covered with liquid browns beautifully: Maillard reaction takes place. And then the bottom kind of stews. And the whole thing kind of gets soft, and the muscle fibers relax and become gelatinous and delicious. And so it&#8217;s a really nice way to cook. It&#8217;s a way to cook on a Sunday to have several meals during the week, because it&#8217;s even better as leftovers than it is the first time around. So, in a way, it was the most sustainable kind of cooking I learned, in the sense that I&#8217;ve been able to fold it into my life on a weekly basis.
AMY GOODMAN : Journalist Michael Pollan. His latest book is Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation . We&#8217;ll return to our interview in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : As we return to my conversation with the award-winning journalist, author Michael Pollan, his new book called Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation , I asked him about the slow food movement and the role of Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, California, restaurant known for using local organic foods, known for slow foods.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Chez Panisse, which was founded in 1971, has had a revolutionary effect on our food culture wherever you live in this country. Alice Waters, who started it, made a point of supporting small farmers, organic farmers, and sustainable farmers in other ways, and cooking a very simple food based on high-quality American ingredients. So the earmarks of that kind of cooking are everywhere. And it&#8217;s been a great place for hundreds of chefs to train. It&#8217;s an incredibly humane kitchen where they&#8217;ve just taught—I mean, chances are good that there&#8217;s a chef, wherever you live, that went—passed through Chez Panisse and learned something important. But their values are—it&#8217;s a famous, elegant restaurant, but it&#8217;s incredibly unpretentious, too. People who go there are often underwhelmed. It&#8217;s like, &quot;This is it? You know, no fancy sauce?&quot; But it&#8217;s just beautiful food cooked with real conviction.
AMY GOODMAN : And what does &quot;slow food&quot; mean?
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, slow food is a movement—I mean, and it actually is an organization, although it&#8217;s bigger than the organization—that arose in protest against fast food. And it begins in Italy in the &#39;80s, specifically when McDonald&#39;s was coming to the Spanish Steps—you know, this kind of hallowed part of Rome. And Carlo Petrini was a left-wing journalist who was outraged that this was a challenge to Italy&#8217;s brilliant food culture. So he had a great idea. Unlike José Bové, who kind of, you know, drove his tractor into a McDonald&#8217;s plate glass, he did a much more Italian protest, which was, he set up a trestle table on the Spanish Steps outside the new McDonald&#8217;s and got all the Italian grandmothers he could find to come bake their—cook their best dish and say, &quot;Here&#8217;s real food. What&#8217;s better? What do you really want?&quot; And it was a protest based on pleasure and which is—you know, it was just—and it was galvanizing. And it started this movement. And, in fact, Carlo—even though this starts after Chez Panisse, Carlo Petrini and Alice Waters became, you know, close allies, and they share the same values. And so, that&#8217;s some of the DNA behind the whole food movement we see rising and this interest in—slow food is about food that is good, clean and fair. They&#8217;re concerned with social justice. They&#8217;re concerned with how the food is grown and how humane and chemical-free it is.
And they&#8217;re concerned with the experience—the loss of the family meal, the loss of eating as a communal activity—everything that fast food and food marketing is doing to our food culture, because—and this is an important theme of the book—there is a deliberate effort to undermine food culture to sell us processed food. The family meal is a challenge if you&#8217;re General Mills or Kellogg or one of these companies, or McDonald&#8217;s, because the family meal is usually one thing shared. It&#8217;s not each member of the family gets to pick what they&#8217;re going to eat and get it out of the frozen food section. And it also is a meal where the parent is really in charge and makes the decisions for the family. And the food industry very much has wanted to insinuate itself into our family, get between parents and kids, to market them food. So slow food is about recovering that space around the family and keeping the influence of the food manufacturers outside of the house. And I think it&#8217;s very, very important, because, you know, one of the inspirations of this book was discovering that we&#8217;re doing so little home cooking now and that the family meal is truly endangered. And, you know, the family meal is very important. It&#8217;s the nursery of democracy. I mean, it really is. I mean, it&#8217;s where we learn and where we teach our children how to share, how to take turns, how to argue without offending, how to learn about the events of the day. I mean, I learned all this at the table. And if kids are spending all their time in their rooms, you know, passing through the kitchen, nuking a frozen pizza, they&#8217;re missing something really important.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to read a quote from your book, Cooked . We&#8217;re talking to Michael Pollan, well-known food writer, thinker, really challenging food policy in this country. Michael, you write, &quot;Today, the typical American spends a mere twenty-seven minutes a day of food preparation, and another four minutes cleaning up. That&#8217;s less than half the time spent cooking and cleaning up in 1965.&quot; You also note that market research shows more than half of the evening meals an American eats are &quot;cooked at home,&quot; but that number may be misleading.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Yeah, well, how do they define &quot;cooking&quot;? It&#8217;s pretty loose. Basically, cooking, in the marketers&#8217; terms, is just any food that has more than one element, that&#8217;s assembled. So, for example, if you took some prewashed bagged lettuce and put a little bit of dressing on it, you&#8217;re cooking. Or if you took some cold cuts and put them on bread, you&#8217;re—and made a sandwich, you&#8217;re cooking. You know, my definition of cooking would be a little more strenuous than that, a little more rigorous—not that I think you always need to cook from scratch. I use, you know, canned tomatoes all the time and canned chickpeas and frozen spinach. And there is a kind of first-order processed food that I think is a real boon to us. These are these one- or two-ingredient processed foods. I think they&#8217;re wonderful. You know, I don&#8217;t want to have to mill my own flour if I want to bake. But there&#8217;s another kind of processing that&#8217;s become much more common in the last decade or two, and that is what&#8217;s often referred to as hyper- or ultra-processed food. These are processed foods that are meant to be entire meal replacements. They&#8217;re called home meal replacements. And this is where we get into trouble, because corporations don&#8217;t cook the way humans do. They really don&#8217;t. All you—and to know that, all you have to do is read the ingredient labels. Those home meal replacements are full of ingredients that no normal human ever has in their pantry. Polysorbate 80, do you have that in your pantry? I don&#8217;t think so. Soy lecithin? Carboxylated—I forget the other two words. I mean, all these—
AMY GOODMAN : No, because the exterminator came and [inaudible].
MICHAEL POLLAN : So, the—so, they cook differently. They also use lots—as you said, lots of salt, fat and sugar to disguise the fact that they&#8217;re using the cheapest possible raw ingredients—and to press our buttons.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, how does that disguise?
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, if you make anything sweet or salty or fatty enough, you&#8217;re not—you&#8217;re not going to notice the quality of the meat or the quality of the vegetables involved. We love salt, fat and sugar. We&#8217;re hard-wired to go for those flavors. They trip our dopamine networks, which are our craving networks. And, you know, Michael Moss has talked about this in his new book, and David Kessler talked about it, too.
AMY GOODMAN : We actually did just recently interview Michael Moss, the New York Times reporter who wrote Salt Sugar Fat , which he looks at how food companies have known for decades that salt, sugar and fat are not good for us in the quantities Americans consume them, yet every year convincing most of us to ingest about twice the recommended amount. I asked Michael Moss how he thought the problem could be addressed. This is part of his answer.
MICHAEL MOSS : You just can&#8217;t throw fresh carrots and fresh apples at kids without engaging them. They&#8217;ll chuck them out in the lunchroom. But if we could invigorate the home economics program in this country, which fell by the waysides, I think that would be a huge—
AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean, home economics?
MICHAEL MOSS : Well, home economics—kids in school used to be taught how to shop, how to cook from scratch, how to be in control of their diets. Doesn&#8217;t happen anymore. And I write about this in the book. What did happen is we got Betty Crocker, a figment of the imagination of a marketing official at a food company. She began pushing processed foods, convenience foods, as an alternative to scratch cooking.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain more.
MICHAEL MOSS : This was back in the &#39;50s and &#8217;60s. Betty Crocker, as you all know—I mean, I used to think she was a real person. She wasn&#39;t. She started out just as a marketing tool for the companies. But she was—became emblematic of the food industry&#8217;s usurpation, if you will, of the home economist. And their notion was, &quot;Hey, look, who&#8217;s got time for scratch meals anymore? Let&#8217;s encourage consumers to buy our convenience foods to make things easier for them.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s New York Times reporter Michael Moss, who wrote Salt Sugar Fat , which is a very good accompaniment to Cooked , Michael Pollan&#8217;s new book. In fact, you, the Michaels, cooked a meal together?
MICHAEL POLLAN : Yeah, we did. We recently—I went out to his house, and we did a meal for the dining section of the Times where we cooked together. He made a pizza. He makes very good pizza. And I made a chickpea soup. I was trying to make something to show that you could make a delicious dish for like two or three bucks. Two cans of chickpeas, a lemon, little olive oil, an onion, you&#8217;re set, and—in an hour, and you have this delicious soup. But—and he&#8217;s—I have great admiration for Michael&#8217;s reporting. This book is terrific. And in a way, they are companion books, because I&#8217;m kind of trying to work on the solution to the problem that he did such an amazing job of anatomizing.
AMY GOODMAN : But the—you know, the picture of the two of you, two men cooking in the kitchen—
MICHAEL POLLAN : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : A lot of women may be thinking right now, &quot;Well, the reason we went to fast foods is we didn&#8217;t have time anymore to do this stuff.&quot;
MICHAEL POLLAN : Yeah, and there&#8217;s some truth to that, although the story about how we moved to processed food is a little more complicated. And the gender politics are really interesting. First of all, the food industry has been trying to worm their way into our kitchens for a hundred years. Betty Crocker goes way back and—as he was talking about. And Betty Crocker was resisted, and the food industry was resisted. Women felt that it was part of their solemn obligation as parents to cook from scratch, and they really resisted processed food. And the breakdown in their resistance doesn&#8217;t come until after World War II, well after World War II. And when women went back to work, marketers found that in fact cooking was the housework they didn&#8217;t want to give up. It was the creative outlet, compared to cleaning, say. But there was such an uncomfortable conversation unfolding at kitchen tables across America over the—renegotiating the division of labor in the house between men and women. And, you know, there was child care, there was housework, there was cooking. And the food industry recognized there was an opportunity here. And what they did was they leapt in with an advertising campaign directed at women, and it was symbolized by this KFC billboard. Kentucky Fried Chicken runs this huge billboard all across America, big bucket of fried chicken under the words &quot;Women&#8217;s Liberation.&quot; And it was brilliant, because they associated not cooking with progressive values, and it had never been so associated before. And that was really—it was the era of Virginia Slims, too, right? It was using feminism to sell products. And it succeeded.
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s go to an ad for cake mix in 1978.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Great.
GRANDFATHER : When did you start baking from scratch?
GRANDDAUGHTER : It&#8217;s not scratch, Grandpa. It&#8217;s Pillsbury Plus.
GRANDFATHER : Devil&#8217;s foodcake this firm? It&#8217;s got to be scratch.
GRANDDAUGHTER : It&#8217;s Pillsbury Plus.
GRANDFATHER : A cake this moist? It&#8217;s got to be scratch. A cake this rich? It&#8217;s got to be scratch.
GRANDDAUGHTER : It&#8217;s Pillsbury Plus. The &quot;Plus&quot; is pudding, pudding right in the mix to add that moistness.
GRANDFATHER : Mmmm, rich flavor. Pillsbury Plus. Looks like scratch has met its match.
AMY GOODMAN : Michael Pollan?
MICHAEL POLLAN : That&#8217;s great. Well, you know, one of the—one of the breakthroughs in selling cake mixes to women, who—and they bombed when they introduced them in the &#39;50s. All you had to do was add water, and then you had a cake. Then they did some market research, and they said, &quot;You know, if you left out the powdered egg and made women crack an actual egg and add it to the mix, they could take ownership of this cake in a new way.&quot; And that&#39;s when they took off. So, it was a very interesting game that was played between marketers and American women to get them to accept this food.
It&#8217;s worth saying that there is a time crisis in the American household. We work really long hours in this country, much more than they do in Europe, where, by the way, there&#8217;s still a lot more home cooking going on, and that one of the earmarks of the labor movement in America, as opposed to Europe, was always to fight for money rather than time. The Europeans fought for time. And that&#8217;s kind of their slow food values, in a sense. You know, and we&#8217;re also working a total—couples are working a total of an extra month a year since the &#39;70s. I mean, it&#39;s a very high amount of time. So, there is a real challenge: How do you cook in the absence of time?
And, you know—but one of the things I found is that convenience food is often not as convenient or time-saving as people think. It doesn&#8217;t take a long time to get good food on the table. There&#8217;s an episode in the book where we did a microwave meal, where we—everyone in the family could go out and buy whatever home meal replacement they wanted. And my son had French onion soup and hoisin beef stir fry, you know, in a bag. And my wife had lasagna, and I had a curry. And we microwaved them all. It took 40 minutes to get this meal on the table. It was ridiculous, because the microwave is such an individualistic technology, you can just do one—one person&#8217;s food at a time. You can&#8217;t put them all in. So, by the time the last one was done, the first one was cold and had to be renuked again. And then my son finally said, &quot;I&#8217;m moving mine to the oven.&quot; And it was just a disaster. And so, it didn&#8217;t save time. I mean, I could have made, you know, a perfectly good meal in 40 minutes.
AMY GOODMAN : Like what? What would you make?
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, I could have made, let&#8217;s say, a stir-fry. I could have made a stir-fry. And we do that all the time. You know, that&#8217;s a 20-minute dish, even with all the chopping.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, we&#8217;re talking to Michael Pollan—
AMY GOODMAN : Journalist Michael Pollan, on his new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation . We&#8217;ve talked fire and water. When we come back from break, air—that&#8217;s baking—then earth, fermentation&#8217;s cold fire, brewing, in 30 seconds.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : We return to my conversation with journalist Michael Pollan, author of the new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation . I asked him to talk about the art of baking bread.
MICHAEL POLLAN : I mean, it sounds really intimidating, but basically, if you put some flour in water and get it to the consistency of like pancake batter—don&#8217;t even measure—don&#8217;t worry about measurement; just get it to batter. Turn it with—you know, give it a lot of air. Mix it vigorously every time you walk by the kitchen for about a week. At a certain point, you&#8217;ll see it will start bubbling. Leave it open to the air. And at a certain point, it will come to life. It&#8217;s an amazing moment. And you&#8217;ll see little bubbles. And you&#8217;ll smell it, and it will smell kind of bready or like yeast. And then you&#8217;ve got your starter.
AMY GOODMAN : Even though you didn&#8217;t use yeast.
MICHAEL POLLAN : You don&#8217;t use yeast, no. Yeast is a—if you want to make great bread, I&#8217;m afraid you can&#8217;t use yeast. And you don&#8217;t need yeast. I mean, yeast is a refined version of a starter. It&#8217;s basically one species of Saccharomyces cerevisiae that&#8217;s been optimized for rapid increase of air in a loaf of bread. A sourdough starter gives you so much more flavor. It&#8217;s such a more complicated little culture. And it reflects the microbes in your area. I mean, it has a terroir to it. It&#8217;s a wonderful thing.
AMY GOODMAN : So, this thing, of the yeast and water you&#8217;re talking about, where you&#8217;re making the sourdough starter, some people pass that down for centuries.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Yes. And there are sourdough starters in the Bay Area that go back to the gold rush. There&#8217;s a real fetishism. There&#8217;s actually a hotel in San Francisco where you can put your starter if you have to go on vacation, and they&#8217;ll feed it for you, like, you know, where you take your pets.
AMY GOODMAN : Oh, my god.
MICHAEL POLLAN : I find if I just kind of feed it well and stick it in the back of the refrigerator, it&#8217;s fine. I mean, I&#8217;m on book tour, and I know when I get home in three weeks, I&#8217;ll be able to wake my starter up. It&#8217;ll take a—you know, it&#8217;ll take a week, but I&#8217;ll wake it up. It is like a pet, and you do have some sense of responsibility to it. And you smell it, and you know, oh, it&#8217;s getting a little sour, I want it to be a little sweeter, so you give it some more flour. And this is—it&#8217;s a miraculous thing. I mean, the whole idea of cooking with microbes, you know, with biology instead of physics, is an astonishing thing. And so, with that starter, you can—you can make beautiful breads, and you can make whole grain bread. It&#8217;s very hard to make whole grain bread without a starter. You know, if you&#8217;ve ever had one of those whole grain breads that just falls apart in the toaster, that&#8217;s because it was made with yeast. The starter conditions the flour in ways that are—make it really delicious and hold together a lot better.
AMY GOODMAN : What kind of sweetener do you use?
MICHAEL POLLAN : I don&#8217;t use any sweetener.
AMY GOODMAN : I used to use barley malt.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Yeah, there&#8217;s a whole kind of culture, and it grows out of the &#39;60s revival of whole grain, which was I don&#39;t think, you know, the proudest moment in American baking. There was a lot of heavy bread that came out of that era, bread that seemed more virtuous than delicious. And so, a lot of sugars were used to make up for the fact that whole grain flour can be more bitter. The bran, which is included, is a little bit bitter. But there&#8217;s really good quality whole grain flour now, and it&#8217;s being milled really well—and there&#8217;s a local wheat movement growing all over the country right now—where the quality of the flour is such that you don&#8217;t need to add sweeteners.
AMY GOODMAN : Where do you get it?
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, there&#8217;s a beautiful mill in California, and company, called Community Grains, which is—I just saw is on the shelf in New York—that&#8217;s doing flours and milling it really beautifully and very fresh. The problem with whole grain is that it goes bad. One of the reasons we moved to white flour, which is a really momentous shift in the history of eating—it&#8217;s really the beginning of the industrialization of food, happens in the 1880s. Roller milling technology is invented, that allows you to completely remove the bran and the germ, OK? Those happen to be the healthiest parts of the wheat berry. And we sell those off to the pharmaceutical industry so they can sell us back the vitamins that we&#8217;ve removed from the flour. It&#8217;s a great business model, but terrible biology. And so, when we figured out how to do that, white flour is stable, so you could mill it anywhere, and it sits on the shelf for years. Whole grain flour is volatile, because it has all these volatile oils. It has omega-3s, for example. And, you know, its helpfulness is directly tied to its perishability. So they didn&#8217;t like that, and they were happy to get rid of whole grain.
Now it&#8217;s coming back. It has to be milled fresh, though. It doesn&#8217;t last as long on the shelf. And, in fact, one of the things I learned, although I wasn&#8217;t able to confirm it, as much as I&#8217;d like, but many millers told me that when you buy commercial whole grain flours from large companies, the germ is not there. They don&#8217;t put it back in. They just put back the bran, because they want it to be more stable. I&#8217;m working with some scientists who are trying to test this, so that we could actually prove that when you buy whole grain flour from a big company, you&#8217;re actually not getting whole grain. But in the meantime, look for stone-milled, a stone mill flour, if it&#8217;s really stone-milled. There&#8217;s a lot of deception in the baking industry, and there has been for hundreds of years. It&#8217;s no reason—it&#8217;s no accident they were stringing up bakers during—and millers, during the French Revolution, because they would put anything in flour, just to fool people—bone meal, chalk. And they would put bakers in the stocks and throw old bread at them.
AMY GOODMAN : When we had this bakery in Maine, in Bar Harbor, I thought the greatest coup would be to get the whole grain bread into the schools of Bar Harbor.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : That was my goal. But we could not compete with Wonder Bread. I mean, as you said—
MICHAEL POLLAN : Uprise.
AMY GOODMAN : Wonder Bread could stay on—well, on—staying on the shelf for two years, versus ours—
MICHAEL POLLAN : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —which after a week, of course, and less than that, it would be moldy, because it was alive.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Exactly. Food should go bad. I mean, there&#8217;s something wrong with food that doesn&#8217;t go bad. I bought a loaf of Wonder Bread the day they went bankrupt and closed, and—because I wanted to have it for old times&#8217; sake. And it&#8217;s still soft. And they went bankrupt, I think, in December. This bread, if feels just like new. How do they do that? In fact, I did go to a Wonder Bread factory and watched them make Wonder Bread, and it was an astonishing process. But it&#8217;s not bread, and it&#8217;s not baking. It&#8217;s something else.
AMY GOODMAN : What is it?
MICHAEL POLLAN : It&#8217;s brilliant food chemistry. I mean, there are so many chemicals in that, and a huge amount of yeast, by the way. I mean, it&#8217;s up to 10 percent yeast by volume. I mean, as a baker, you know that that&#8217;s an outrageous amount of yeast. But the idea is to get this giant cough of carbon dioxide into that dough as fast as possible. And then there are all these dough conditioners and texturizers so it won&#8217;t stick to the equipment. I mean, it&#8217;s totally automated. Hands never touch this dough. And so, the result—and then they&#8217;re trying to have these health claims about fiber, so they&#8217;re putting in fiber from God knows where—I mean, from trees, from—you know, from the roots of chicory. I mean, anywhere they can find fiber, they&#8217;re putting that in. And it&#8217;s just—
AMY GOODMAN : You mean just to say—
MICHAEL POLLAN : Just so they could say &quot;high fiber.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : —it has fiber. So why didn&#8217;t they just keep it in and keep the original fiber in?
MICHAEL POLLAN : Because it was—whole grain bread is—I mean, whole grain wheat is just this volatile, difficult substance to work with, and they wanted something that was consistent. And so, it was just about rationalizing the process. And I think they probably don&#8217;t want to deal with the germ. The germ is troublesome, even though the germ is delicious and healthful. And then they put lots of sugars in. You look how much sugar is in a typical supermarket loaf of bread, it&#8217;s a lot of sugar. It&#8217;s just become one of those sugar delivery systems in our food economy.
But I found this moment when we came up with white flour was a turning point, because—in human history, because, going back to the fire two million years ago, every advance in food processing or cooking technology improved our health, gave us something really important, gave us more nutrition, gave us more energy, and for some reason we turn a corner in 1880. And from then on, most food processing makes food less healthy—takes out fiber, for example, adds—it refines it so that the sugars are more readily absorbable. And what we now have is a processed food system of foods that are very high energy but not very high nutrients, and they&#8217;re absorbed in the upper gastrointestinal tract like this. And I think that that wrong turn—we kind of got too smart for our own good.
The invention of bread was an amazing advance, because you can&#8217;t live—you can&#8217;t survive on flour, even whole grain flour. You can survive on bread made from it. The cooking process unlocks the nutrients in that seed. And seeds have everything you need to live, but it all must be unlocked. And a slow fermentation unlocks all that, and a cooking at a high temperature. The loaf of bread itself becomes a pressure cooker. See, instead of—you&#8217;re going beyond the temperature of boiling water in a loaf of bread, and steam can get much hotter than water. And so, you&#8217;re steaming the starches, which breaks them down. It&#8217;s just the most beautiful technology. But, of course, then we screwed it up.
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s move on, finally, to earth, to fermentation.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Yeah, this is the pure cooking with microbes and no heat at all. And this, to me, was the most fascinating journey of all. I learned how to pickle vegetables, make sauerkraut and kimchi, and I learned how to make cheese. I worked with the Cheese Nun, this famous nun in Connecticut, Sister Noella, who makes a beautiful French-style cheese from raw milk and—in Bethlehem, Connecticut. And then I worked with brewers and learned a whole lot about microbiology and this unseen world. And I kind of rethought my whole relationship to bacteria, which I had the normal fear and loathing of, like most of us. I grew up in a, you know, bacterially hostile environment—lots of antibiotics, lots of antiseptics, lots of, you know, &quot;Let&#8217;s throw out that can; it might possibly be dented, it might have botulism.&quot; And I kind of learned—I fell in love with bacteria and the amazing things they can do to flavor. And the fact that you can cut up a cabbage, salt it, mush it around with your hands to bruise it, put it in a crock, do nothing else, and it will turn into sauerkraut in a week or two, it&#8217;s an amazing thing, and that there are bacteria—
AMY GOODMAN : No water?
MICHAEL POLLAN : No. The water comes out of the sauerkraut. The salt draws the water out, and that becomes the brine. And the bacteria are already present on the leaves. The bacteria that can break down anything alive is usually accompanying it. There are bacteria on your body that will go to work as soon as you die. And the same is true on a plant. And so, the bacteria you want are there, and it&#8217;s a managed rot, essentially, and rot interrupted, basically. And then there&#8217;s this wonderful succession of species, ever more acidic, until it stabilizes with all this lactic acid and ends up being a—you know, creating all these very strong—you know, to some people, kind of edgy—flavors that bacteria do. I mean, you think about a stinky cheese. And these are flavors on the edge of acceptability. And I talk a lot, in fact, about the erotics of disgust, which is a big, big factor in cheese that we never talk about.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about it.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, think about this. You know, I mean, the vocabulary surrounding cheese is like—compared to wine, is really impoverished. People say, &quot;Mmm, that&#8217;s really good.&quot; The furthest they&#8217;ll go is: &quot;That&#8217;s kind of barnyardy.&quot; What is that? Well, that&#8217;s a euphemism for animal manure and animals, in general.
And I explored this whole issue of these foods that are on the edge of disgust that we like. And every culture has one, it seems, that they prize and other cultures think is really gross. And so, if you go to China, as I did for the research in this book, they think cheese is one of the most disgusting foods imaginable, even just the cheddar. I mean, I&#8217;m not talking about a really stinky cheese, not Limburger. But they are just grossed out by cheese. And yet, they love stinky tofu, a food so garbage-like in its stink that it&#8217;s only eaten outdoors. And it&#8217;s basically blocks of tofu that are set into a rotting, pussy mass of vegetables, and it lives there for a very long time, and then it&#8217;s fried or just eaten that way. And it&#8217;s—it&#8217;s intense. I tried it. And—or the Icelandic—people in Iceland love this shark that they bury for six months and let rot underground, and then it gets like this ammoniated taste that they love. It&#8217;s very defining, I think, for cultures to have a food that every other culture—that you—that is an acquired taste, because people don&#8217;t like it, by nature, but that becomes this socially cohesive thing. We&#8217;re the people who love a good stinky cheese.
And so, anyway—and some of the bacteria that make a cheese stinky—this was a shock and revelation to me—are more or less the same bacteria that grow on your skin and give the human odor to you, that are—they&#8217;re fermenting your perspiration, the same ones that are fermenting the rind of a washed-rind cheese. And so it&#8217;s no accident—you know, the French call the stinky cheese the pieds de Dieu , the feet of God, which is—what a weird term. All right, so foot odor, but of a very exalted kind. So, anyway, food takes us in the most amazing places. And—
AMY GOODMAN : Brewing—what about brewing?
MICHAEL POLLAN : Brewing was great fun. And I am—I&#8217;m not very good at it yet. My first batch, which I thought tasted fine, I brought to the brewmaster who was teaching me, and he took one sniff, and he said, &quot;Getting a little off, off odor in here. Yes, Band-Aid.&quot; And it did, as soon as he said that. There&#8217;s something about a metaphor that makes you smell something that you wouldn&#8217;t smell otherwise, like, yeah, I&#8217;m getting that Band-Aid smell. It&#8217;s kind of antiseptic. So I&#8217;m working on it. I&#8217;m getting better.
You know, brewing beer is—it&#8217;s probably the first kind of alcohol, that or mead, which is honey wine. It is—it may well be, I learned, as I studied the history of it, the inspiration for agriculture may not have been food; it may have been alcohol. And there&#8217;s some very interesting evidence to suggest that the reason people gave up hunter-gatherers and settled down to have these row crops, which were all fermentable, the first ones, was because they wanted an easy, steady supply of alcohol. It was easy to find food in the world. It was very hard to find alcohol. You had to find some honey that you could—or some ripe fruit, and that was hard to do. But as soon as you could grow grain and mash it and add water and boil it, you could then introduce some yeast from a past batch of beer, and you had this wonderful panacea and pleasure-giving substance.
AMY GOODMAN : What is your favorite dish to cook?
MICHAEL POLLAN : I still love a roast chicken. That&#8217;s my comfort food, you know, and I&#8217;ll always fall back to roast chicken. I love braises. I find that&#8217;s a great winter comfort food. It&#8217;s all broken down. There are vegetables in it, and it creates its own sauce. And so, those are great comfort foods for me. But I also have developed a taste for kimchi, and I make kimchi, and I always have kimchi going. I have a pot burbling somewhere in my kitchen. And—
AMY GOODMAN : And explain what kimchi is.
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, kimchi is basically the Korean version of sauerkraut. It&#8217;s a cabbage ferment, but with lots of—it&#8217;s easier to make than sauerkraut, even though it has more ingredients, because it&#8217;s got lots of spices in it. It has garlic, and it has ginger, and it has red peppers. And all those things keep funguses from forming, which can be a problem making sauerkraut. It will get mushy, because you&#8217;ve got some fungi in there you don&#8217;t need. Doesn&#8217;t happen with kimchi. Koreans live by it. It is a very healthy food. It feeds the—you know, we have an internal fermentation going on, too, in our large intestine that&#8217;s really important to our health. And fermented food helps feed that fermentation, both with substrate fiber and really good bacteria. You&#8217;re getting—you know, if you&#8217;re interested in probiotics, you can get them in pills.
AMY GOODMAN : And what do you mean by probiotics?
MICHAEL POLLAN : Well, probiotics are a healthy bacteria. They&#8217;re bacteria that—you know, yogurt has probiotics in it. These are basically bacteria that contribute to our health, either by stimulating the immune system or changing the expression of genes in our own bacteria. I got kind of deep into the microbiology of this. It turns out we&#8217;re only 10 percent human and 90 percent microbes. And one of the problems with the modern Western diet is it only feeds the 10 percent. It offers very little to the 90 percent, which are these microbes, which you really depend on to be healthy. And fermented food is a way to give them something that they really like to eat. So I try to do that.
AMY GOODMAN : Michael, what were you most surprised by in writing Cooked ?
MICHAEL POLLAN : I guess I was surprised that some of these things I found incredibly daunting are not, that even baking, you can throw away your recipe book at a certain point and trust your senses. Cooking has been so fetishized in our culture and so complicated and professionalized. You know, we watch these shows on TV that make cooking look like, you know, competitive sports. There&#8217;s a clock running down. Knives are flying, fires, you know, fountains. And it looks really intimidating. Once you actually get in the kitchen and you&#8217;re willing to fail a little and trust your instincts—I now bake by sense. I know when the dough is getting billowy, and I know when it smells—you know, it&#8217;s getting a little too acidic, I better stop the fermentation. You know, we need to—there was this interesting moment when Dr. Spock came along in the &#39;60s, and everybody had gotten so intimidated about child rearing by all the experts telling them what to do and the companies selling formula and the modern way of birth and all this kind of stuff. And he came along and just kind of restored people&#39;s confidence in their instincts. I think that needs to happen in the kitchen, too. I think we&#8217;ve really been separated from this fundamental—cooking is in our DNA . It really goes deep in our species, in our culture. And it is true that we need to—that we need to rebuild a culture of cooking that can&#8217;t be like the old one. It can&#8217;t be women&#8217;s work. We have to get everybody back in the kitchen.
But one of the other most surprising things I learned is that if you cook, if you eat food cooked by a human, either yourself or a loved one, you don&#8217;t have to worry about your diet. It takes care of itself. You won&#8217;t eat crap. You won&#8217;t make French fries every day. You won&#8217;t make cream-filled cakes every day. It&#8217;s too much work. You&#8217;ll be eating real food. You won&#8217;t have to count calories. Home cooking is a guarantor of a healthy diet. We know, in general, that the poorer you are, the worse your diet. Not if you&#8217;re cooking. Poor women who cook have a healthier diet than wealthy women who don&#8217;t. So, it is really—cooking is the key to health. Not to mention, all these amazing pleasures. You know, I don&#8217;t see it as drudgery anymore. I see it as alchemy.
AMY GOODMAN : Journalist Michael Pollan, author of the new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation . You can visit our website to see our interviews with Professor Pollan talking about his books, In Defense of Food: An Eater&#8217;s Manifesto and Food Rules: An Eater&#8217;s Manual . You can go to our website at democracynow.org.
Oh, and we have a job opening at Democracy Now! , an annual giving manager to head up our individual giving program. Apply if you&#8217;re passionate about funding independent media and have experience with online fundraising, annual giving campaigns, donor relations and database management. You can find out more at democracynow.org.
Also, you can read transcripts of all shows, and you can see the shows at democracynow.org, as well as listen to them. Tell your friends. You can also tweet about us and go to our Facebook page , as well. AMYGOODMAN: We spend the hour today with one of the country’s leading writers and thinkers on food and food policy: Michael Pollan. He has written several best-selling books about food, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. He has just written a new book called Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. In the book, Michael Pollan argues taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make our food system healthier and more sustainable. Michael Pollan is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism. He joined me in New York when his book was released just a week ago. I started by asking him about the journey he took in writing Cooked.

MICHAELPOLLAN: It was probably the most fun I’ve ever had as a writer. And it’s hard to describe it as work exactly. When I figured out what I wanted to do, which was kind of drive cooking back to its most elemental reality, I decided to apprentice myself to a series of masters. And I divided it into four essential transformations that—you know, kind of the common denominator of all cooking: fire, cooking with fire, you know, the oldest; water, which is to say cooking in pots, which comes much later in history and involves a whole different set of ways of transferring heat; air, for baking; and earth, for fermentation. And so, in each case, I found somebody or a couple somebodies who were really good at the mastery of that element, and I worked for them, you know, a number of shifts, a number of events, and—or lessons, and just kind of acquired these skills that I had never had before.

AMYGOODMAN: So tell us about your trip to North Carolina, to the barbecue maker.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, I wanted to start with fire because fire is where cooking starts, probably two million years ago, according to the current thinking, which is before, of course, we were Homo sapiens. We were still Homo erectus at that point. And when we acquired the control of fire and the ability to cook meat especially over fire, but other things, as well, we unlocked this treasure trove of calories, of energy, that other animals didn’t have, because when you cook food, you basically predigest it outside of the body, so you don’t have to use as much energy—your body doesn’t have to use as much energy to break it down. You don’t have to chew it as much. And it’s a huge boon, and it probably led to the larger brain that we have compared to other apes our size, and the smaller gut—although we seem intent on enlarging that gut right now.

But so I figured what was the—what was the cooking most like that? And it was whole-hog barbecue as practiced in eastern North Carolina. You know, barbecue is very balkanized, and every region in the South has very different rules on what constitutes barbecue and an abhorrence of all other forms of barbecue, which they won’t even call barbecue. So I went to North Carolina, to eastern North Carolina, and I worked with a man named Ed Mitchell, who is a pretty well-known pitmaster, African American, who’s been at it for many, many years, after being a Vietnam vet and working as a Ford—in the Ford dealership network. And I went—we did a couple barbecues, where we cooked these whole pigs over wood and very slowly, and then we had these amazing public events, where you have to take an entire pig and chop it up, mix it with various spices and vinegar, and turn it into sandwiches. It’s actually remarkably simple kind of cooking. It’s like pig, heat, wood, time. That’s the whole recipe. But you need a whole pig, and you have to be able to move it around, which is a little tricky.

What I liked about Ed is, unlike almost every other pitmaster I could find, he cared about the pigs and where they came from. Barbecue is an incredibly democratic food. It’s cheaper than McDonald’s in many places and far more delicious. On the other hand, the only reason it can be that cheap is they use commodity hogs, the worst of the worst, which is—you know, it’s an industry kind of ruining North Carolina. Ed Mitchell is a little different in that he really cares where the hogs come from. And in fact he’s paid a price for that with the industry. And—

AMYGOODMAN: In what way?

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, you know, they—when he started kind of evangelizing about using small farmers’ hogs raised outdoors, all of a sudden he had tax audits and prosecutions for various business practices. And, you know, no one’s been able to prove the quid pro quo, but the timing is awfully suspicious. And he lost one of his restaurants because of this initiative against him.

AMYGOODMAN: And explain what his concern was about commodity hogs.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, you know, hogs today are raised indoors in brutal conditions in these confinement—CAFOs—confinement operations. They’re—the sows live in little cages too narrow for them ever to turn around in their entire lives, because they don’t want them to crush their babies, and it just makes it easier to inseminate them, which they do over and over and over again. And these pigs, you know, go crazy gradually. I mean, I’ve written about this before, and that’s one of the reasons I had trouble celebrating barbecue that wasn’t in some sense humane or sustainable. And Ed has figured out how to do it. And, of course, he has to charge $9 or $10 for a sandwich. Other places charge $3. But on the other hand, it’s a whole meal, so I don’t begrudge him that price.

AMYGOODMAN: And explain how he does it.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, Ed does whole hog exclusively. He thinks the way they do it over in, you know, the western part of the state, where they just do pork shoulders, it’s good, but it’s not barbecue. And he does it in—over wood and charcoal very slowly. So you—the key to making barbecue is getting the temperature consistent and low, like 200 degrees. None of us cook at 200 degrees. That’s like a hot tub—I mean, it’s a hot hot tub. But when you do that, the fat kind of slowly renders into the meat, and the meat gradually breaks down. And after 20 hours or so, you could pull the whole thing apart with a fork, and it’s really delicious.

AMYGOODMAN: So, you went from fire to?

MICHAELPOLLAN: To water. And, you know, fire cooking is very male. It’s very—there’s a lot of self-dramatizing guys doing barbecue, as there still are in every backyard in America. And it’s very ritualistic and very public and very communal. It has some wonderful and stupid, you know, bombastic qualities.

Cooking in pots is more domestic, traditionally more feminine, more modest. You know, it happens under a lid. You can’t see what’s happening. You can’t watch a pot boil, because it won’t boil. But it’s a very important technology, and the second important cooking technology. It comes—doesn’t happen until about 10,000 years ago, because you need pottery that can hold water and survive heat to start cooking this way. But when you can cook with water, by boiling water, you can soften grains, for example. A revolution happens in human society, because you can feed old people and very young people who don’t have teeth. So, the elderly live longer as soon as you can boil food, and you can wean babies earlier. So, it’s a wonderful method for that. And it also allows you to combine plants and meat or just plants. It allows you to eat grain, which you can’t really eat without water. And it really, you know, was a revolutionary way of cooking.

And I approached it as a lesson, a series of lessons in braising stews and soups. And I worked with this wonderful chef named Samin Nosrat, who is Iranian American, trained at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. And she would come to my house every, you know, couple Sundays, and we’d make a big meal together. And my wife and son would get involved, and then we’d invite friends over. And I learned these wonderful lessons from her. And every time, she’d have a theme. You know, "Today we’re going to learn about emulsification." And—

AMYGOODMAN: So, what is emulsification?

MICHAELPOLLAN: Emulsification is basically combining fats and waters in a stable solution, like when you whip eggs or—salad dressing is an emulsification, basically. And how do you get those particles to stay together? Or we do a lesson in the Maillard reaction, which is how, in the presence of heat, amino acids and sugars turn into these wonderful flavor compounds, thousands of them, that makes food much more flavorful, much more allusive. One of the—one of the interesting common denominators of all cooking is that you take these very straightforward given simple flavors, and you complicate them, and you make a food taste like other things. It might taste like—give it the aroma of flowers or, I mean, bacon or—it’s sort of like poetic language, I mean, basically, you know, where you inflect everyday language into something more heightened and allusive to other things, more metaphorical. And you do that with cooking, too. And so, we worked on that. And these were the most practical skills I learned, the ones I use every day. I love making braises. It’s incredibly simple, but time-consuming.

AMYGOODMAN: What do you mean by braises?

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, a braise is basically a stew where you don’t cover the meat, or whatever the central character of your dish is, with liquid. You basically make a mirepoix, which is just a dice of onions and carrots and celery, and you sauté that for as long as you can bear—the longer, the better—and then you add the—you brown your meat, say, if you’re doing chicken, and you put that in, and then you add a liquid. But you only have the liquid come up an inch or so, and it doesn’t cover the meat. And what that does is—and you only cook it very slowly, again, like 225 degrees, for as long as you can stand. You know, four hours is better; chicken, you can get away with two hours. And what happens is the—the part that isn’t covered with liquid browns beautifully: Maillard reaction takes place. And then the bottom kind of stews. And the whole thing kind of gets soft, and the muscle fibers relax and become gelatinous and delicious. And so it’s a really nice way to cook. It’s a way to cook on a Sunday to have several meals during the week, because it’s even better as leftovers than it is the first time around. So, in a way, it was the most sustainable kind of cooking I learned, in the sense that I’ve been able to fold it into my life on a weekly basis.

AMYGOODMAN: Journalist Michael Pollan. His latest book is Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. We’ll return to our interview in a minute.

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AMYGOODMAN: As we return to my conversation with the award-winning journalist, author Michael Pollan, his new book called Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, I asked him about the slow food movement and the role of Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, California, restaurant known for using local organic foods, known for slow foods.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Chez Panisse, which was founded in 1971, has had a revolutionary effect on our food culture wherever you live in this country. Alice Waters, who started it, made a point of supporting small farmers, organic farmers, and sustainable farmers in other ways, and cooking a very simple food based on high-quality American ingredients. So the earmarks of that kind of cooking are everywhere. And it’s been a great place for hundreds of chefs to train. It’s an incredibly humane kitchen where they’ve just taught—I mean, chances are good that there’s a chef, wherever you live, that went—passed through Chez Panisse and learned something important. But their values are—it’s a famous, elegant restaurant, but it’s incredibly unpretentious, too. People who go there are often underwhelmed. It’s like, "This is it? You know, no fancy sauce?" But it’s just beautiful food cooked with real conviction.

AMYGOODMAN: And what does "slow food" mean?

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, slow food is a movement—I mean, and it actually is an organization, although it’s bigger than the organization—that arose in protest against fast food. And it begins in Italy in the '80s, specifically when McDonald's was coming to the Spanish Steps—you know, this kind of hallowed part of Rome. And Carlo Petrini was a left-wing journalist who was outraged that this was a challenge to Italy’s brilliant food culture. So he had a great idea. Unlike José Bové, who kind of, you know, drove his tractor into a McDonald’s plate glass, he did a much more Italian protest, which was, he set up a trestle table on the Spanish Steps outside the new McDonald’s and got all the Italian grandmothers he could find to come bake their—cook their best dish and say, "Here’s real food. What’s better? What do you really want?" And it was a protest based on pleasure and which is—you know, it was just—and it was galvanizing. And it started this movement. And, in fact, Carlo—even though this starts after Chez Panisse, Carlo Petrini and Alice Waters became, you know, close allies, and they share the same values. And so, that’s some of the DNA behind the whole food movement we see rising and this interest in—slow food is about food that is good, clean and fair. They’re concerned with social justice. They’re concerned with how the food is grown and how humane and chemical-free it is.

And they’re concerned with the experience—the loss of the family meal, the loss of eating as a communal activity—everything that fast food and food marketing is doing to our food culture, because—and this is an important theme of the book—there is a deliberate effort to undermine food culture to sell us processed food. The family meal is a challenge if you’re General Mills or Kellogg or one of these companies, or McDonald’s, because the family meal is usually one thing shared. It’s not each member of the family gets to pick what they’re going to eat and get it out of the frozen food section. And it also is a meal where the parent is really in charge and makes the decisions for the family. And the food industry very much has wanted to insinuate itself into our family, get between parents and kids, to market them food. So slow food is about recovering that space around the family and keeping the influence of the food manufacturers outside of the house. And I think it’s very, very important, because, you know, one of the inspirations of this book was discovering that we’re doing so little home cooking now and that the family meal is truly endangered. And, you know, the family meal is very important. It’s the nursery of democracy. I mean, it really is. I mean, it’s where we learn and where we teach our children how to share, how to take turns, how to argue without offending, how to learn about the events of the day. I mean, I learned all this at the table. And if kids are spending all their time in their rooms, you know, passing through the kitchen, nuking a frozen pizza, they’re missing something really important.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to read a quote from your book, Cooked. We’re talking to Michael Pollan, well-known food writer, thinker, really challenging food policy in this country. Michael, you write, "Today, the typical American spends a mere twenty-seven minutes a day of food preparation, and another four minutes cleaning up. That’s less than half the time spent cooking and cleaning up in 1965." You also note that market research shows more than half of the evening meals an American eats are "cooked at home," but that number may be misleading.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Yeah, well, how do they define "cooking"? It’s pretty loose. Basically, cooking, in the marketers’ terms, is just any food that has more than one element, that’s assembled. So, for example, if you took some prewashed bagged lettuce and put a little bit of dressing on it, you’re cooking. Or if you took some cold cuts and put them on bread, you’re—and made a sandwich, you’re cooking. You know, my definition of cooking would be a little more strenuous than that, a little more rigorous—not that I think you always need to cook from scratch. I use, you know, canned tomatoes all the time and canned chickpeas and frozen spinach. And there is a kind of first-order processed food that I think is a real boon to us. These are these one- or two-ingredient processed foods. I think they’re wonderful. You know, I don’t want to have to mill my own flour if I want to bake. But there’s another kind of processing that’s become much more common in the last decade or two, and that is what’s often referred to as hyper- or ultra-processed food. These are processed foods that are meant to be entire meal replacements. They’re called home meal replacements. And this is where we get into trouble, because corporations don’t cook the way humans do. They really don’t. All you—and to know that, all you have to do is read the ingredient labels. Those home meal replacements are full of ingredients that no normal human ever has in their pantry. Polysorbate 80, do you have that in your pantry? I don’t think so. Soy lecithin? Carboxylated—I forget the other two words. I mean, all these—

AMYGOODMAN: No, because the exterminator came and [inaudible].

MICHAELPOLLAN: So, the—so, they cook differently. They also use lots—as you said, lots of salt, fat and sugar to disguise the fact that they’re using the cheapest possible raw ingredients—and to press our buttons.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, how does that disguise?

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, if you make anything sweet or salty or fatty enough, you’re not—you’re not going to notice the quality of the meat or the quality of the vegetables involved. We love salt, fat and sugar. We’re hard-wired to go for those flavors. They trip our dopamine networks, which are our craving networks. And, you know, Michael Moss has talked about this in his new book, and David Kessler talked about it, too.

AMYGOODMAN: We actually did just recently interview Michael Moss, the New York Times reporter who wrote Salt Sugar Fat, which he looks at how food companies have known for decades that salt, sugar and fat are not good for us in the quantities Americans consume them, yet every year convincing most of us to ingest about twice the recommended amount. I asked Michael Moss how he thought the problem could be addressed. This is part of his answer.

MICHAELMOSS: You just can’t throw fresh carrots and fresh apples at kids without engaging them. They’ll chuck them out in the lunchroom. But if we could invigorate the home economics program in this country, which fell by the waysides, I think that would be a huge—

AMYGOODMAN: What do you mean, home economics?

MICHAELMOSS: Well, home economics—kids in school used to be taught how to shop, how to cook from scratch, how to be in control of their diets. Doesn’t happen anymore. And I write about this in the book. What did happen is we got Betty Crocker, a figment of the imagination of a marketing official at a food company. She began pushing processed foods, convenience foods, as an alternative to scratch cooking.

AMYGOODMAN: Explain more.

MICHAELMOSS: This was back in the '50s and ’60s. Betty Crocker, as you all know—I mean, I used to think she was a real person. She wasn't. She started out just as a marketing tool for the companies. But she was—became emblematic of the food industry’s usurpation, if you will, of the home economist. And their notion was, "Hey, look, who’s got time for scratch meals anymore? Let’s encourage consumers to buy our convenience foods to make things easier for them."

AMYGOODMAN: That’s New York Times reporter Michael Moss, who wrote Salt Sugar Fat, which is a very good accompaniment to Cooked, Michael Pollan’s new book. In fact, you, the Michaels, cooked a meal together?

MICHAELPOLLAN: Yeah, we did. We recently—I went out to his house, and we did a meal for the dining section of the Times where we cooked together. He made a pizza. He makes very good pizza. And I made a chickpea soup. I was trying to make something to show that you could make a delicious dish for like two or three bucks. Two cans of chickpeas, a lemon, little olive oil, an onion, you’re set, and—in an hour, and you have this delicious soup. But—and he’s—I have great admiration for Michael’s reporting. This book is terrific. And in a way, they are companion books, because I’m kind of trying to work on the solution to the problem that he did such an amazing job of anatomizing.

AMYGOODMAN: But the—you know, the picture of the two of you, two men cooking in the kitchen—

MICHAELPOLLAN: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: A lot of women may be thinking right now, "Well, the reason we went to fast foods is we didn’t have time anymore to do this stuff."

MICHAELPOLLAN: Yeah, and there’s some truth to that, although the story about how we moved to processed food is a little more complicated. And the gender politics are really interesting. First of all, the food industry has been trying to worm their way into our kitchens for a hundred years. Betty Crocker goes way back and—as he was talking about. And Betty Crocker was resisted, and the food industry was resisted. Women felt that it was part of their solemn obligation as parents to cook from scratch, and they really resisted processed food. And the breakdown in their resistance doesn’t come until after World War II, well after World War II. And when women went back to work, marketers found that in fact cooking was the housework they didn’t want to give up. It was the creative outlet, compared to cleaning, say. But there was such an uncomfortable conversation unfolding at kitchen tables across America over the—renegotiating the division of labor in the house between men and women. And, you know, there was child care, there was housework, there was cooking. And the food industry recognized there was an opportunity here. And what they did was they leapt in with an advertising campaign directed at women, and it was symbolized by this KFC billboard. Kentucky Fried Chicken runs this huge billboard all across America, big bucket of fried chicken under the words "Women’s Liberation." And it was brilliant, because they associated not cooking with progressive values, and it had never been so associated before. And that was really—it was the era of Virginia Slims, too, right? It was using feminism to sell products. And it succeeded.

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s go to an ad for cake mix in 1978.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Great.

GRANDFATHER: When did you start baking from scratch?

GRANDDAUGHTER: It’s not scratch, Grandpa. It’s Pillsbury Plus.

GRANDFATHER: Devil’s foodcake this firm? It’s got to be scratch.

GRANDDAUGHTER: It’s Pillsbury Plus.

GRANDFATHER: A cake this moist? It’s got to be scratch. A cake this rich? It’s got to be scratch.

GRANDDAUGHTER: It’s Pillsbury Plus. The "Plus" is pudding, pudding right in the mix to add that moistness.

MICHAELPOLLAN: That’s great. Well, you know, one of the—one of the breakthroughs in selling cake mixes to women, who—and they bombed when they introduced them in the '50s. All you had to do was add water, and then you had a cake. Then they did some market research, and they said, "You know, if you left out the powdered egg and made women crack an actual egg and add it to the mix, they could take ownership of this cake in a new way." And that's when they took off. So, it was a very interesting game that was played between marketers and American women to get them to accept this food.

It’s worth saying that there is a time crisis in the American household. We work really long hours in this country, much more than they do in Europe, where, by the way, there’s still a lot more home cooking going on, and that one of the earmarks of the labor movement in America, as opposed to Europe, was always to fight for money rather than time. The Europeans fought for time. And that’s kind of their slow food values, in a sense. You know, and we’re also working a total—couples are working a total of an extra month a year since the '70s. I mean, it's a very high amount of time. So, there is a real challenge: How do you cook in the absence of time?

And, you know—but one of the things I found is that convenience food is often not as convenient or time-saving as people think. It doesn’t take a long time to get good food on the table. There’s an episode in the book where we did a microwave meal, where we—everyone in the family could go out and buy whatever home meal replacement they wanted. And my son had French onion soup and hoisin beef stir fry, you know, in a bag. And my wife had lasagna, and I had a curry. And we microwaved them all. It took 40 minutes to get this meal on the table. It was ridiculous, because the microwave is such an individualistic technology, you can just do one—one person’s food at a time. You can’t put them all in. So, by the time the last one was done, the first one was cold and had to be renuked again. And then my son finally said, "I’m moving mine to the oven." And it was just a disaster. And so, it didn’t save time. I mean, I could have made, you know, a perfectly good meal in 40 minutes.

AMYGOODMAN: Like what? What would you make?

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, I could have made, let’s say, a stir-fry. I could have made a stir-fry. And we do that all the time. You know, that’s a 20-minute dish, even with all the chopping.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we’re talking to Michael Pollan—

AMYGOODMAN: Journalist Michael Pollan, on his new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. We’ve talked fire and water. When we come back from break, air—that’s baking—then earth, fermentation’s cold fire, brewing, in 30 seconds.

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AMYGOODMAN: We return to my conversation with journalist Michael Pollan, author of the new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. I asked him to talk about the art of baking bread.

MICHAELPOLLAN: I mean, it sounds really intimidating, but basically, if you put some flour in water and get it to the consistency of like pancake batter—don’t even measure—don’t worry about measurement; just get it to batter. Turn it with—you know, give it a lot of air. Mix it vigorously every time you walk by the kitchen for about a week. At a certain point, you’ll see it will start bubbling. Leave it open to the air. And at a certain point, it will come to life. It’s an amazing moment. And you’ll see little bubbles. And you’ll smell it, and it will smell kind of bready or like yeast. And then you’ve got your starter.

AMYGOODMAN: Even though you didn’t use yeast.

MICHAELPOLLAN: You don’t use yeast, no. Yeast is a—if you want to make great bread, I’m afraid you can’t use yeast. And you don’t need yeast. I mean, yeast is a refined version of a starter. It’s basically one species of Saccharomyces cerevisiae that’s been optimized for rapid increase of air in a loaf of bread. A sourdough starter gives you so much more flavor. It’s such a more complicated little culture. And it reflects the microbes in your area. I mean, it has a terroir to it. It’s a wonderful thing.

AMYGOODMAN: So, this thing, of the yeast and water you’re talking about, where you’re making the sourdough starter, some people pass that down for centuries.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Yes. And there are sourdough starters in the Bay Area that go back to the gold rush. There’s a real fetishism. There’s actually a hotel in San Francisco where you can put your starter if you have to go on vacation, and they’ll feed it for you, like, you know, where you take your pets.

AMYGOODMAN: Oh, my god.

MICHAELPOLLAN: I find if I just kind of feed it well and stick it in the back of the refrigerator, it’s fine. I mean, I’m on book tour, and I know when I get home in three weeks, I’ll be able to wake my starter up. It’ll take a—you know, it’ll take a week, but I’ll wake it up. It is like a pet, and you do have some sense of responsibility to it. And you smell it, and you know, oh, it’s getting a little sour, I want it to be a little sweeter, so you give it some more flour. And this is—it’s a miraculous thing. I mean, the whole idea of cooking with microbes, you know, with biology instead of physics, is an astonishing thing. And so, with that starter, you can—you can make beautiful breads, and you can make whole grain bread. It’s very hard to make whole grain bread without a starter. You know, if you’ve ever had one of those whole grain breads that just falls apart in the toaster, that’s because it was made with yeast. The starter conditions the flour in ways that are—make it really delicious and hold together a lot better.

AMYGOODMAN: What kind of sweetener do you use?

MICHAELPOLLAN: I don’t use any sweetener.

AMYGOODMAN: I used to use barley malt.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Yeah, there’s a whole kind of culture, and it grows out of the '60s revival of whole grain, which was I don't think, you know, the proudest moment in American baking. There was a lot of heavy bread that came out of that era, bread that seemed more virtuous than delicious. And so, a lot of sugars were used to make up for the fact that whole grain flour can be more bitter. The bran, which is included, is a little bit bitter. But there’s really good quality whole grain flour now, and it’s being milled really well—and there’s a local wheat movement growing all over the country right now—where the quality of the flour is such that you don’t need to add sweeteners.

AMYGOODMAN: Where do you get it?

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, there’s a beautiful mill in California, and company, called Community Grains, which is—I just saw is on the shelf in New York—that’s doing flours and milling it really beautifully and very fresh. The problem with whole grain is that it goes bad. One of the reasons we moved to white flour, which is a really momentous shift in the history of eating—it’s really the beginning of the industrialization of food, happens in the 1880s. Roller milling technology is invented, that allows you to completely remove the bran and the germ, OK? Those happen to be the healthiest parts of the wheat berry. And we sell those off to the pharmaceutical industry so they can sell us back the vitamins that we’ve removed from the flour. It’s a great business model, but terrible biology. And so, when we figured out how to do that, white flour is stable, so you could mill it anywhere, and it sits on the shelf for years. Whole grain flour is volatile, because it has all these volatile oils. It has omega-3s, for example. And, you know, its helpfulness is directly tied to its perishability. So they didn’t like that, and they were happy to get rid of whole grain.

Now it’s coming back. It has to be milled fresh, though. It doesn’t last as long on the shelf. And, in fact, one of the things I learned, although I wasn’t able to confirm it, as much as I’d like, but many millers told me that when you buy commercial whole grain flours from large companies, the germ is not there. They don’t put it back in. They just put back the bran, because they want it to be more stable. I’m working with some scientists who are trying to test this, so that we could actually prove that when you buy whole grain flour from a big company, you’re actually not getting whole grain. But in the meantime, look for stone-milled, a stone mill flour, if it’s really stone-milled. There’s a lot of deception in the baking industry, and there has been for hundreds of years. It’s no reason—it’s no accident they were stringing up bakers during—and millers, during the French Revolution, because they would put anything in flour, just to fool people—bone meal, chalk. And they would put bakers in the stocks and throw old bread at them.

AMYGOODMAN: When we had this bakery in Maine, in Bar Harbor, I thought the greatest coup would be to get the whole grain bread into the schools of Bar Harbor.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: That was my goal. But we could not compete with Wonder Bread. I mean, as you said—

MICHAELPOLLAN: Uprise.

AMYGOODMAN: Wonder Bread could stay on—well, on—staying on the shelf for two years, versus ours—

MICHAELPOLLAN: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: —which after a week, of course, and less than that, it would be moldy, because it was alive.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Exactly. Food should go bad. I mean, there’s something wrong with food that doesn’t go bad. I bought a loaf of Wonder Bread the day they went bankrupt and closed, and—because I wanted to have it for old times’ sake. And it’s still soft. And they went bankrupt, I think, in December. This bread, if feels just like new. How do they do that? In fact, I did go to a Wonder Bread factory and watched them make Wonder Bread, and it was an astonishing process. But it’s not bread, and it’s not baking. It’s something else.

AMYGOODMAN: What is it?

MICHAELPOLLAN: It’s brilliant food chemistry. I mean, there are so many chemicals in that, and a huge amount of yeast, by the way. I mean, it’s up to 10 percent yeast by volume. I mean, as a baker, you know that that’s an outrageous amount of yeast. But the idea is to get this giant cough of carbon dioxide into that dough as fast as possible. And then there are all these dough conditioners and texturizers so it won’t stick to the equipment. I mean, it’s totally automated. Hands never touch this dough. And so, the result—and then they’re trying to have these health claims about fiber, so they’re putting in fiber from God knows where—I mean, from trees, from—you know, from the roots of chicory. I mean, anywhere they can find fiber, they’re putting that in. And it’s just—

AMYGOODMAN: You mean just to say—

MICHAELPOLLAN: Just so they could say "high fiber."

AMYGOODMAN: —it has fiber. So why didn’t they just keep it in and keep the original fiber in?

MICHAELPOLLAN: Because it was—whole grain bread is—I mean, whole grain wheat is just this volatile, difficult substance to work with, and they wanted something that was consistent. And so, it was just about rationalizing the process. And I think they probably don’t want to deal with the germ. The germ is troublesome, even though the germ is delicious and healthful. And then they put lots of sugars in. You look how much sugar is in a typical supermarket loaf of bread, it’s a lot of sugar. It’s just become one of those sugar delivery systems in our food economy.

But I found this moment when we came up with white flour was a turning point, because—in human history, because, going back to the fire two million years ago, every advance in food processing or cooking technology improved our health, gave us something really important, gave us more nutrition, gave us more energy, and for some reason we turn a corner in 1880. And from then on, most food processing makes food less healthy—takes out fiber, for example, adds—it refines it so that the sugars are more readily absorbable. And what we now have is a processed food system of foods that are very high energy but not very high nutrients, and they’re absorbed in the upper gastrointestinal tract like this. And I think that that wrong turn—we kind of got too smart for our own good.

The invention of bread was an amazing advance, because you can’t live—you can’t survive on flour, even whole grain flour. You can survive on bread made from it. The cooking process unlocks the nutrients in that seed. And seeds have everything you need to live, but it all must be unlocked. And a slow fermentation unlocks all that, and a cooking at a high temperature. The loaf of bread itself becomes a pressure cooker. See, instead of—you’re going beyond the temperature of boiling water in a loaf of bread, and steam can get much hotter than water. And so, you’re steaming the starches, which breaks them down. It’s just the most beautiful technology. But, of course, then we screwed it up.

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s move on, finally, to earth, to fermentation.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Yeah, this is the pure cooking with microbes and no heat at all. And this, to me, was the most fascinating journey of all. I learned how to pickle vegetables, make sauerkraut and kimchi, and I learned how to make cheese. I worked with the Cheese Nun, this famous nun in Connecticut, Sister Noella, who makes a beautiful French-style cheese from raw milk and—in Bethlehem, Connecticut. And then I worked with brewers and learned a whole lot about microbiology and this unseen world. And I kind of rethought my whole relationship to bacteria, which I had the normal fear and loathing of, like most of us. I grew up in a, you know, bacterially hostile environment—lots of antibiotics, lots of antiseptics, lots of, you know, "Let’s throw out that can; it might possibly be dented, it might have botulism." And I kind of learned—I fell in love with bacteria and the amazing things they can do to flavor. And the fact that you can cut up a cabbage, salt it, mush it around with your hands to bruise it, put it in a crock, do nothing else, and it will turn into sauerkraut in a week or two, it’s an amazing thing, and that there are bacteria—

AMYGOODMAN: No water?

MICHAELPOLLAN: No. The water comes out of the sauerkraut. The salt draws the water out, and that becomes the brine. And the bacteria are already present on the leaves. The bacteria that can break down anything alive is usually accompanying it. There are bacteria on your body that will go to work as soon as you die. And the same is true on a plant. And so, the bacteria you want are there, and it’s a managed rot, essentially, and rot interrupted, basically. And then there’s this wonderful succession of species, ever more acidic, until it stabilizes with all this lactic acid and ends up being a—you know, creating all these very strong—you know, to some people, kind of edgy—flavors that bacteria do. I mean, you think about a stinky cheese. And these are flavors on the edge of acceptability. And I talk a lot, in fact, about the erotics of disgust, which is a big, big factor in cheese that we never talk about.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about it.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, think about this. You know, I mean, the vocabulary surrounding cheese is like—compared to wine, is really impoverished. People say, "Mmm, that’s really good." The furthest they’ll go is: "That’s kind of barnyardy." What is that? Well, that’s a euphemism for animal manure and animals, in general.

And I explored this whole issue of these foods that are on the edge of disgust that we like. And every culture has one, it seems, that they prize and other cultures think is really gross. And so, if you go to China, as I did for the research in this book, they think cheese is one of the most disgusting foods imaginable, even just the cheddar. I mean, I’m not talking about a really stinky cheese, not Limburger. But they are just grossed out by cheese. And yet, they love stinky tofu, a food so garbage-like in its stink that it’s only eaten outdoors. And it’s basically blocks of tofu that are set into a rotting, pussy mass of vegetables, and it lives there for a very long time, and then it’s fried or just eaten that way. And it’s—it’s intense. I tried it. And—or the Icelandic—people in Iceland love this shark that they bury for six months and let rot underground, and then it gets like this ammoniated taste that they love. It’s very defining, I think, for cultures to have a food that every other culture—that you—that is an acquired taste, because people don’t like it, by nature, but that becomes this socially cohesive thing. We’re the people who love a good stinky cheese.

And so, anyway—and some of the bacteria that make a cheese stinky—this was a shock and revelation to me—are more or less the same bacteria that grow on your skin and give the human odor to you, that are—they’re fermenting your perspiration, the same ones that are fermenting the rind of a washed-rind cheese. And so it’s no accident—you know, the French call the stinky cheese the pieds de Dieu, the feet of God, which is—what a weird term. All right, so foot odor, but of a very exalted kind. So, anyway, food takes us in the most amazing places. And—

AMYGOODMAN: Brewing—what about brewing?

MICHAELPOLLAN: Brewing was great fun. And I am—I’m not very good at it yet. My first batch, which I thought tasted fine, I brought to the brewmaster who was teaching me, and he took one sniff, and he said, "Getting a little off, off odor in here. Yes, Band-Aid." And it did, as soon as he said that. There’s something about a metaphor that makes you smell something that you wouldn’t smell otherwise, like, yeah, I’m getting that Band-Aid smell. It’s kind of antiseptic. So I’m working on it. I’m getting better.

You know, brewing beer is—it’s probably the first kind of alcohol, that or mead, which is honey wine. It is—it may well be, I learned, as I studied the history of it, the inspiration for agriculture may not have been food; it may have been alcohol. And there’s some very interesting evidence to suggest that the reason people gave up hunter-gatherers and settled down to have these row crops, which were all fermentable, the first ones, was because they wanted an easy, steady supply of alcohol. It was easy to find food in the world. It was very hard to find alcohol. You had to find some honey that you could—or some ripe fruit, and that was hard to do. But as soon as you could grow grain and mash it and add water and boil it, you could then introduce some yeast from a past batch of beer, and you had this wonderful panacea and pleasure-giving substance.

AMYGOODMAN: What is your favorite dish to cook?

MICHAELPOLLAN: I still love a roast chicken. That’s my comfort food, you know, and I’ll always fall back to roast chicken. I love braises. I find that’s a great winter comfort food. It’s all broken down. There are vegetables in it, and it creates its own sauce. And so, those are great comfort foods for me. But I also have developed a taste for kimchi, and I make kimchi, and I always have kimchi going. I have a pot burbling somewhere in my kitchen. And—

AMYGOODMAN: And explain what kimchi is.

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, kimchi is basically the Korean version of sauerkraut. It’s a cabbage ferment, but with lots of—it’s easier to make than sauerkraut, even though it has more ingredients, because it’s got lots of spices in it. It has garlic, and it has ginger, and it has red peppers. And all those things keep funguses from forming, which can be a problem making sauerkraut. It will get mushy, because you’ve got some fungi in there you don’t need. Doesn’t happen with kimchi. Koreans live by it. It is a very healthy food. It feeds the—you know, we have an internal fermentation going on, too, in our large intestine that’s really important to our health. And fermented food helps feed that fermentation, both with substrate fiber and really good bacteria. You’re getting—you know, if you’re interested in probiotics, you can get them in pills.

AMYGOODMAN: And what do you mean by probiotics?

MICHAELPOLLAN: Well, probiotics are a healthy bacteria. They’re bacteria that—you know, yogurt has probiotics in it. These are basically bacteria that contribute to our health, either by stimulating the immune system or changing the expression of genes in our own bacteria. I got kind of deep into the microbiology of this. It turns out we’re only 10 percent human and 90 percent microbes. And one of the problems with the modern Western diet is it only feeds the 10 percent. It offers very little to the 90 percent, which are these microbes, which you really depend on to be healthy. And fermented food is a way to give them something that they really like to eat. So I try to do that.

AMYGOODMAN: Michael, what were you most surprised by in writing Cooked?

MICHAELPOLLAN: I guess I was surprised that some of these things I found incredibly daunting are not, that even baking, you can throw away your recipe book at a certain point and trust your senses. Cooking has been so fetishized in our culture and so complicated and professionalized. You know, we watch these shows on TV that make cooking look like, you know, competitive sports. There’s a clock running down. Knives are flying, fires, you know, fountains. And it looks really intimidating. Once you actually get in the kitchen and you’re willing to fail a little and trust your instincts—I now bake by sense. I know when the dough is getting billowy, and I know when it smells—you know, it’s getting a little too acidic, I better stop the fermentation. You know, we need to—there was this interesting moment when Dr. Spock came along in the '60s, and everybody had gotten so intimidated about child rearing by all the experts telling them what to do and the companies selling formula and the modern way of birth and all this kind of stuff. And he came along and just kind of restored people's confidence in their instincts. I think that needs to happen in the kitchen, too. I think we’ve really been separated from this fundamental—cooking is in our DNA. It really goes deep in our species, in our culture. And it is true that we need to—that we need to rebuild a culture of cooking that can’t be like the old one. It can’t be women’s work. We have to get everybody back in the kitchen.

But one of the other most surprising things I learned is that if you cook, if you eat food cooked by a human, either yourself or a loved one, you don’t have to worry about your diet. It takes care of itself. You won’t eat crap. You won’t make French fries every day. You won’t make cream-filled cakes every day. It’s too much work. You’ll be eating real food. You won’t have to count calories. Home cooking is a guarantor of a healthy diet. We know, in general, that the poorer you are, the worse your diet. Not if you’re cooking. Poor women who cook have a healthier diet than wealthy women who don’t. So, it is really—cooking is the key to health. Not to mention, all these amazing pleasures. You know, I don’t see it as drudgery anymore. I see it as alchemy.

AMYGOODMAN: Journalist Michael Pollan, author of the new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation . You can visit our website to see our interviews with Professor Pollan talking about his books, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. You can go to our website at democracynow.org.

Oh, and we have a job opening at Democracy Now!, an annual giving manager to head up our individual giving program. Apply if you’re passionate about funding independent media and have experience with online fundraising, annual giving campaigns, donor relations and database management. You can find out more at democracynow.org.

Also, you can read transcripts of all shows, and you can see the shows at democracynow.org, as well as listen to them. Tell your friends. You can also tweet about us and go to our Facebook page, as well.

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Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400Undercover Activist Details Secret Filming of Animal Abuse & Why "Ag-Gag" Laws May Force Him to Stophttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/9/undercover_activist_details_secret_filming_of
tag:democracynow.org,2013-04-09:en/story/30a109 AARON MATÉ: In recent years, activists and investigators have gone undercover to reveal shocking cases of animal cruelty at some of the nation&#8217;s largest plants and farms. In many cases, they have made secret videos of the abuses, leading to prosecutions, closures, recalls and vows from the offenders to change their practices. In 2008, this undercover investigation by the Humane Society exposed wrongdoing by a California meat processor. A warning to our viewers, some of the images are very graphic.
HUMANE SOCIETY INVESTIGATION : An investigation by the Humane Society of the United States uncovers abuse of downed dairy cows, cows too sick or too injured to stand, at a California slaughterhouse. What&#8217;s more, the meat is being served to children through the National School Lunch Program.
AARON MATÉ: That undercover investigation by the Humane Society resulted in the largest meat recall in U.S. history. In the last two years, activists have also caught on camera employees of a Tyson Foods supplier in Wyoming flinging piglets into the air, workers at Bettencourt Dairies in Idaho shocking cows, and the searing of beaks off of young chicks at Sparboe Farms in Iowa. In the case of Tyson and Bettencourt, the employees were charged with cruelty to animals. In the case of Sparboe Farms, the company lost one of its biggest customers: the fast food giant McDonald&#8217;s.
AMY GOODMAN : But the videos have also sparked a reaction in the oppose direction: criminalizing those who blow the whistle. A front-page article in The New York Times this weekend noted that a dozen or so state legislatures have introduced bills that target people who covertly expose farm animal abuse. These so-called &quot;ag-gag&quot; bills, as they&#8217;re known, make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms or apply for a job at one without disclosing affiliations with animal rights groups. They also require activists to hand over undercover videos immediately, preventing them from publicizing findings and sparking public outcry or documenting trends.
Five states already have ag-gag laws in place. North Carolina has just become the latest state to consider such a law, joining a list that includes Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont. Many of these bills have been introduced with the backing of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC , a mechanism for corporate lobbyists to help write state laws.
In a moment, we&#8217;ll host a debate on the so-called &quot;ag-gag&quot; laws, but first we&#8217;re joined by one of the activists whose undercover work has sparked their passage. The activist agreed to join us today on the condition he could use a pseudonym and conceal his identity. He asked us to refer to him simply as &quot;Pete.&quot; Pete is an undercover animal rights investigator who has secretly captured animal abuse on farms and slaughterhouses for the past 11 years. He has released footage to groups such as Mercy for Animals, helping spark national outcry and charges against the abusers. His investigations have led to at least 15 criminal cases, and his videos have been used in a number of documentaries.
Pete, we welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what it is that you do?
PETE : Sure. Thank you for having me.
What I do is go undercover to work for an extended period of time, maybe two weeks, maybe longer, maybe six weeks or so, at farms, ranches and slaughterhouses. And the main thing that I do is focus on any and all criminal activity that exists at a facility. So, an undercover investigator&#8217;s job is to show everything that occurs, whether it&#8217;s legal or illegal. There&#8217;s a lot of standard practices that may look cruel, but they&#8217;re legal. And that is up to a campaigns department and lobbyists and the public to decide if they want to change that.
For an investigator, the main objective is to document all illegal activity and get that information to the authorities. And every single facility, whether it is a corporate facility or a family farm, whether it has a couple hundred animals or whether it has a million chickens on it, every one that I&#8217;ve worked at has been breaking the law. And because we keep finding illegal activity, and because we&#8217;re getting more cooperation from law enforcement now, I believe that has fueled some of these ag-gag laws in an attempt to try to stop us.
AARON MATÉ: And Pete, how do you go about doing it? Obviously, here we&#8217;re calling you Pete, not your real name. Do you give your real name when you&#8217;re applying for these jobs?
PETE : Yes, I do. I give—you know, because I have to fill out a W-2, and so I&#8217;m obligated to put my real name. You know, these investigations are done legally, so we don&#8217;t use fake IDs. You know, we don&#8217;t use fake names. And the most critical point is that when we&#8217;re hired, we do everything how they tell us to do it, so, you know, we try to fit in. We generally—you know, an investigator&#8217;s—part of the job is to always make sure that if you&#8217;re doing a good job, you get them to note that and let you know you are in fact doing your job: They can&#8217;t blame any problems on you.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to ask you about your time working at the Ohio hog farm in 2006. You captured this footage showing hundreds of impregnated pigs crammed into gestation crates that restrict their movement. They&#8217;re held in these crates, standing up or collapsed on the floor, for up to 116 days. The investigation was featured in the HBO documentary Death on a Factory Farm . Let&#8217;s go to a clip.
PETE : It&#8217;s a large farm. Basically, their operation is to birth and raise the pigs, then send them off to become hogs ready for slaughter. They use gestation crates and farrowing crates, just like most other hog farms in America. Gestation crates are where sows are impregnated in those crates, and they&#8217;re waiting while they&#8217;re pregnant.
How do they know which ones are pregnant? How do you know on a pig?
HOG FARMER : Huh?
PETE : You just see on the belly?
HOG FARMER : All these are pregnant.
PETE : You can just tell on the belly?
HOG FARMER : Yeah.
PETE : They are totally confined, shoulder to shoulder so they can&#8217;t move, for about 113 to 116 days. If they lie down, they have to plop straight down.
AMY GOODMAN : That is an excerpt of the HBO documentary. Pete, what happened here? How did you document it? And what resulted from your findings?
PETE : So, in that investigation, that was a little bit different. And in that, we actually had a whistleblower complaint that they were hanging crippled sows to death. They would—they would wait until they had too many sows, the female hogs, that were downed, and they started to become a nuisance. And so then they would be dragged out. They&#8217;d put a chain around their necks, then hang them from a front loader. And it would take about four to five minutes for them to be hanged to death.
Normally in an investigation, the targets are actually chosen randomly, and we consistently find violations of the law, regardless. But in this case, I went in because there was a whistleblower who complained about that specific act. However, a judge determined that hanging hogs to death was a legal means of euthanasia, and so they were not prosecuted for that act.
AARON MATÉ: Pete, I just want to clarify, you said earlier that you find cruelty 100 percent of the time?
PETE : One hundred percent of the time. You know, I mean, it would stand to reason that there has to be a farm out there, at least one, that&#8217;s not breaking the law. That would stand to reason. The only thing I can tell you is that I have not found it yet.
So, I have worked at a—for example, just with the dairies alone, I&#8217;ve worked at Bettencourt Dairy in Idaho, which at the one site that I was at, one of their numerous sites, there were about 6,000 cows, and, you know, people were breaking the law every day there. I&#8217;ve worked at the Conklin Dairy Farm in Ohio. It was a family-owned farm, had about 200 cows, the most sadistic animal abuse that I&#8217;ve ever seen. And I&#8217;ve worked at the E6 Cattle Ranch in Texas, also family-owned, and the owner was convicted for cruelty to animals. Another MFA investigator worked at a large dairy in New York, and he worked alongside a mechanic. And it just so happened that the one worker that he was working alongside was also convicted for breaking the law for cruelty to animals.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to talk about one of the dairies, Pete. You recently infiltrated Bettencourt Dairies in Idaho and released some shocking footage. The video shows a cow being dragged on the floor by a chain attached from her neck to a moving tractor. It also shows dairy workers viciously beating and shocking cows and violently twisting their tails. Additionally, your hidden camera captured unsafe and unsanitary conditions, including feces-covered floors that cause cows to regularly slip, fall and injure themselves. There were also sick and injured cows suffering from open wounds, broken bones and infected udders left to suffer without veterinary care. Now, Bettencourt Dairies is Idaho&#8217;s largest dairy operation and cheese supplier for Kraft and Burger King. Three of the dairy workers were charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty due to your investigation. Tell us exactly what happened, how you got the video out, how you made it public, and who these people were who were convicted.
PETE : Absolutely. So, the entire purpose behind the Bettencourt investigation was that—I guess I should start by saying that my identity has been made public by the Animal Agriculture Alliance, and they&#8217;ve been trying to prevent me from getting undercover at farms and slaughterhouses. So the whole reason that I went to Idaho is specifically because Mercy for Animals hired me to just work at any facility that I could. And so I went to Idaho because I&#8217;ve never been there, and I chose the dairy industry because I hadn&#8217;t worked at a dairy in over two years. On that alone, I decided to go apply at Bettencourt. They were the first place to hire me.
And within 45 minutes of arriving on my first day, there was the—I filmed the incident that you discussed of someone putting a chain around a downed cow&#8217;s neck and dragging her out of a stall. The manager, Felipe, of that site, the Dry Creek Dairy site, he shocked the downed cow about 50 times with a hand-held device. He was the one who put the chain around her neck. I still don&#8217;t understand why he was not charged for that crime. But there it was, on my first day, that management was involved in the most hideous act of abuse that I saw while I was there.
The investigation lasted three weeks, and there were acts of unnecessary cruelty, of people beating and punching cows in the face and punching them in the eyes, and so forth, throughout that time. Once we felt that we had established a pattern of abuse and showed everyone who was involved in it, though no cow during that time had an imminent threat to their so that we felt we needed to cut the case immediately, we then went to law enforcement.
AMY GOODMAN : And what happened to these people? Are they still working in the plant, though they were charged with misdemeanor? And the companies that use Bettencourt, the largest plant in the state?
PETE : Right. So, I guess first I should say Felipe, to my knowledge, is still running that site. He was not charged. There were three workers that were charged. Two fled. One was convicted. And the company itself was not charged.
So, the Bettencourts said that, you know, they&#8217;re going to put up cameras and that they&#8217;re going to have people sign a policy saying, &quot;Don&#8217;t abuse animals.&quot; I want to make this very clear: Most facilities that I&#8217;ve worked at, you have to sign a form that says you will not abuse animals. I have worked at more than one facility that has cameras that are operating there. I don&#8217;t know who&#8217;s behind the camera, but certainly they&#8217;ve never uncovered anything that I&#8217;ve been able to find with my hidden cameras. So I don&#8217;t believe that that&#8217;s going to actually do anything to minimize the amount of illegal cruelty at Bettencourt.
AARON MATÉ: Pete, I also want to ask you about what you uncovered at the Martin Creek Kennel in Arkansas. Your investigation was featured in the 2006 HBO documentary called Dealing Dogs . Let&#8217;s go to a clip. And again, a warning to our viewers: These images are very graphic.
PETE : Up at the trench, there&#8217;s a table sitting right next to the trench with a bloody knife on top. And the whole table is just covered in dried blood. The area around the table is just littered with dog organs.
These are lines of trenches. Started out here, and he keeps digging new trenches as he fills them up. More dogs, whole dogs. OK, this dog here had been cut open.
AARON MATÉ: That&#8217;s a clip from the 2006 HBO documentary Dealing Dogs . Pete, talk about what you found there.
PETE : Sure. So, that facility, they had been suspected for a long time of abusing animals. And it was a place that was licensed by the USDA to sell random-source dogs and cats to research labs. That&#8217;s called a Class B license. A few of those still exist, and most of them now buy their dogs and cats from pounds. So they go to the local shelter and then—or animal control facility, and then they&#8217;ll resell them to research. That facility was the largest in operation, having over 600 dogs at a time, over 100 cats at a time. And they would sell to universities for research all over the country. Not only were they abusing the dogs on a daily basis, but they were also getting a lot of stolen pets.
That facility was eventually shut down. The U.S. attorney&#8217;s office got involved, because they were also involved in a felony fraud. They had a veterinarian pre-signing their interstate health certificates without checking the dogs. And so, for every one of those that crossed state lines, it was a felony. It&#8217;s kind of like hitting Al Capone for tax evasion. But anyway, all of the animals were rescued once the U.S. attorney&#8217;s office raided the facility, and they were permanently shut down.
That said, there&#8217;s an interesting point about that case, which is that, you know, you look at—you look at a facility like that, it&#8217;s licensed by the government, and you wonder how can they be doing these things. Like, how can all of these farms and slaughterhouses be breaking the law, and no one but undercover activists finds out about it? Well, at Martin Creek Kennel, I watched a USDA inspection. I watched two federal inspectors walk through the facility, and they did not find a single dog that was dying of open wounds that I was able to document that day at that facility. I&#8217;ve seen federal inspections at several facilities that I&#8217;ve worked at, and they don&#8217;t find any of the crimes that I&#8217;ve uncovered while I&#8217;m there. So, I applaud the USDA for all of the action that they take, and I&#8217;m not trying to—I&#8217;m not trying to come down on them. But what I&#8217;m trying to say is that an inspection alone or third-party verification does not find the kind of criminal activity that an undercover investigation will find. And there is no law enforcement agency that exists in this country to do undercover work of puppy mills, factory farms and slaughterhouses.
AMY GOODMAN : Pete—
PETE : It&#8217;s up to nonprofit groups.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about the so-called ag-gag bills that would criminalize the undercover work you do? Republican State Senator David Hinkins of Utah told his local station, KSL -TV, he doesn&#8217;t understand opposition to the so-called ag-gag bills. Hinkins said, quote, &quot;If a wife were abusing her husband, we wouldn&#8217;t sneak into their living room and set up a hidden camera. We don&#8217;t want people mistreating animals. ... There are authorities they can contact. They don&#8217;t need to be detectives or the Pink Panther sneaking around.&quot; Your response?
PETE : Two things. Number one, animals cannot speak for themselves. So, of course, domestic violence is a complicated issue, but ultimately, you can question a battered spouse and try to get the truth from them. You cannot ask an animal, &quot;Who kicked you?&quot; or &quot;Who&#8217;s neglecting you?&quot;
The second thing—and I hesitate to say this because I have so much respect for law enforcement, and we&#8217;ve seen so much cooperation from law enforcement especially in the last few years, but corruption and apathy from law enforcement still is a big problem that we find when we&#8217;re dealing with animal cases. And if you&#8217;re a cop, and if you hear that, and that shocks you, it&#8217;s because you&#8217;re a good cop. But I can&#8217;t tell you how many times it is that we find clear violations of the law, and the local authorities won&#8217;t do anything. And it&#8217;s tough. You know, it&#8217;s very hard, if you&#8217;re a police officer in a rural county, you go to church with, and you live alongside, or you&#8217;re involved in the same business as the people who some activist comes in and starts showing conditions that, you know, they point out are illegal, but that you may—you may do yourself, or your friends may do themselves.
AMY GOODMAN : Pete, how would the ag-gag bills—
PETE : So that makes it a very complicated issue.
AMY GOODMAN : —affect you and your work?
PETE : They would make it illegal for me to do my job.
AMY GOODMAN : How?
PETE : It&#8217;s pure and simple. Well, so, the ag-gag laws generally say that if you document conditions at a facility, if you take a photograph or video of an animal agriculture facility, you&#8217;re breaking the law.
What they&#8217;ll also say—and this is the most clever—is they&#8217;ll say that if you see an act of illegal abuse, you have to report it within 24 hours. That&#8217;s misleading. It&#8217;s misleading because if you just show illegal activity from one individual, you can&#8217;t then show who else is involved in that illegal activity. And when one person is busted—and I absolutely swear to this—they&#8217;re not going to—it&#8217;s not going to stop other people from breaking the law. It&#8217;s going to let everyone else know they need to be more careful about how they do it, or they just need to make sure that they&#8217;re more careful about who they hire.
The second thing is that it&#8217;s not always clear what is illegal. The first dairy that I worked at, I saw someone kick a cow right in the side of her head to try and get her to stand. I documented it, thought it was illegal. Turns out, it&#8217;s perfectly normal to try to do to a cow to make her stand, that the first thing you should do is kick her right in the side of the head or the neck. When I saw people hanging crippled sows to death in Ohio, I assumed that surely that&#8217;s illegal. In fact, it looked sadistic. Turns out that&#8217;s perfectly legal. So you don&#8217;t always know.
AMY GOODMAN : And so, what happens when you get to continue to record? What is your point that when you turn it in after 24 hours, it hurts what you do?
PETE : Well, so let&#8217;s say that you go to a facility, and you believe that someone has—in fact, let&#8217;s set it up as best we can. Let&#8217;s say you see an act that you believe is illegal, someone admits that it&#8217;s illegal, and you have an attorney standing by within 24 hours to tell you it&#8217;s illegal. You&#8217;re very unlikely to meet all three of those conditions. You are then missing out on any pattern of abuse to determine if this is a one-off incident. You&#8217;re then missing out on an opportunity to determine if anyone else is involved in breaking the law. And you&#8217;re missing out on an opportunity to find out if management at that facility is aware of this, to see if it&#8217;s more of a systemic problem, like we found at Bettencourt and like we found at multiple facilities when we do these investigations. So it really hinders—it prevents you from working a criminal case.
AMY GOODMAN : Pete, you wanted to be a police officer when you were young?
PETE : Yes, absolutely. That&#8217;s the reason that I started doing this. I wanted to go into law enforcement, but, you know, I realized there&#8217;s a lot of people that are going into law enforcement, and there&#8217;s very few people doing this. And there is just no such thing as a cop whose sole job is to go undercover to look out for farmed animals or for dogs in puppy mills. So I decided to combine my two passions, since I was an animal rights activist and I wanted to be a cop, and try and do this job.
AARON MATÉ: And, Pete, since these ag-gag laws have been passed, have you stopped your work in any of the states where they have gone into effect?
PETE : Yes, I have. The main group that I work for is Mercy for Animals. They are an extremely gutsy group. They are extremely professional. And they are very, very focused on not only campaigning for animal welfare, but for finding illegal activity on farms and slaughterhouses. It&#8217;s why I love working for them. And they do everything completely legally. So, any states where the ag-gag laws have passed, it&#8217;s a no-go to work there.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, we want to thank you for being with us. Pete is the name he asked us to use; it&#8217;s not his real name, though he does use his real name when he goes undercover; is an undercover animal rights investigator who has secretly captured animal abuse on farms and slaughterhouses. He has released the footage to groups such as Mercy for Animals, helping spark national outcry and charges against abusers. He&#8217;s using the pseudonym to conceal his identity, not disclosing his whereabouts, so he can continue to get hired by unknowing slaughterhouses, farms and other facilities suspected of animal abuse. HBO and others have used his video in their documentaries.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we&#8217;ll have a debate on the so-called ag-gag bills. Stay with us. AARON MATÉ: In recent years, activists and investigators have gone undercover to reveal shocking cases of animal cruelty at some of the nation’s largest plants and farms. In many cases, they have made secret videos of the abuses, leading to prosecutions, closures, recalls and vows from the offenders to change their practices. In 2008, this undercover investigation by the Humane Society exposed wrongdoing by a California meat processor. A warning to our viewers, some of the images are very graphic.

HUMANESOCIETYINVESTIGATION: An investigation by the Humane Society of the United States uncovers abuse of downed dairy cows, cows too sick or too injured to stand, at a California slaughterhouse. What’s more, the meat is being served to children through the National School Lunch Program.

AARON MATÉ: That undercover investigation by the Humane Society resulted in the largest meat recall in U.S. history. In the last two years, activists have also caught on camera employees of a Tyson Foods supplier in Wyoming flinging piglets into the air, workers at Bettencourt Dairies in Idaho shocking cows, and the searing of beaks off of young chicks at Sparboe Farms in Iowa. In the case of Tyson and Bettencourt, the employees were charged with cruelty to animals. In the case of Sparboe Farms, the company lost one of its biggest customers: the fast food giant McDonald’s.

AMYGOODMAN: But the videos have also sparked a reaction in the oppose direction: criminalizing those who blow the whistle. A front-page article in The New York Times this weekend noted that a dozen or so state legislatures have introduced bills that target people who covertly expose farm animal abuse. These so-called "ag-gag" bills, as they’re known, make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms or apply for a job at one without disclosing affiliations with animal rights groups. They also require activists to hand over undercover videos immediately, preventing them from publicizing findings and sparking public outcry or documenting trends.

Five states already have ag-gag laws in place. North Carolina has just become the latest state to consider such a law, joining a list that includes Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont. Many of these bills have been introduced with the backing of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a mechanism for corporate lobbyists to help write state laws.

In a moment, we’ll host a debate on the so-called "ag-gag" laws, but first we’re joined by one of the activists whose undercover work has sparked their passage. The activist agreed to join us today on the condition he could use a pseudonym and conceal his identity. He asked us to refer to him simply as "Pete." Pete is an undercover animal rights investigator who has secretly captured animal abuse on farms and slaughterhouses for the past 11 years. He has released footage to groups such as Mercy for Animals, helping spark national outcry and charges against the abusers. His investigations have led to at least 15 criminal cases, and his videos have been used in a number of documentaries.

Pete, we welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what it is that you do?

PETE: Sure. Thank you for having me.

What I do is go undercover to work for an extended period of time, maybe two weeks, maybe longer, maybe six weeks or so, at farms, ranches and slaughterhouses. And the main thing that I do is focus on any and all criminal activity that exists at a facility. So, an undercover investigator’s job is to show everything that occurs, whether it’s legal or illegal. There’s a lot of standard practices that may look cruel, but they’re legal. And that is up to a campaigns department and lobbyists and the public to decide if they want to change that.

For an investigator, the main objective is to document all illegal activity and get that information to the authorities. And every single facility, whether it is a corporate facility or a family farm, whether it has a couple hundred animals or whether it has a million chickens on it, every one that I’ve worked at has been breaking the law. And because we keep finding illegal activity, and because we’re getting more cooperation from law enforcement now, I believe that has fueled some of these ag-gag laws in an attempt to try to stop us.

AARON MATÉ: And Pete, how do you go about doing it? Obviously, here we’re calling you Pete, not your real name. Do you give your real name when you’re applying for these jobs?

PETE: Yes, I do. I give—you know, because I have to fill out a W-2, and so I’m obligated to put my real name. You know, these investigations are done legally, so we don’t use fake IDs. You know, we don’t use fake names. And the most critical point is that when we’re hired, we do everything how they tell us to do it, so, you know, we try to fit in. We generally—you know, an investigator’s—part of the job is to always make sure that if you’re doing a good job, you get them to note that and let you know you are in fact doing your job: They can’t blame any problems on you.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to ask you about your time working at the Ohio hog farm in 2006. You captured this footage showing hundreds of impregnated pigs crammed into gestation crates that restrict their movement. They’re held in these crates, standing up or collapsed on the floor, for up to 116 days. The investigation was featured in the HBO documentary Death on a Factory Farm. Let’s go to a clip.

PETE: It’s a large farm. Basically, their operation is to birth and raise the pigs, then send them off to become hogs ready for slaughter. They use gestation crates and farrowing crates, just like most other hog farms in America. Gestation crates are where sows are impregnated in those crates, and they’re waiting while they’re pregnant.

How do they know which ones are pregnant? How do you know on a pig?

HOGFARMER: Huh?

PETE: You just see on the belly?

HOGFARMER: All these are pregnant.

PETE: You can just tell on the belly?

HOGFARMER: Yeah.

PETE: They are totally confined, shoulder to shoulder so they can’t move, for about 113 to 116 days. If they lie down, they have to plop straight down.

AMYGOODMAN: That is an excerpt of the HBO documentary. Pete, what happened here? How did you document it? And what resulted from your findings?

PETE: So, in that investigation, that was a little bit different. And in that, we actually had a whistleblower complaint that they were hanging crippled sows to death. They would—they would wait until they had too many sows, the female hogs, that were downed, and they started to become a nuisance. And so then they would be dragged out. They’d put a chain around their necks, then hang them from a front loader. And it would take about four to five minutes for them to be hanged to death.

Normally in an investigation, the targets are actually chosen randomly, and we consistently find violations of the law, regardless. But in this case, I went in because there was a whistleblower who complained about that specific act. However, a judge determined that hanging hogs to death was a legal means of euthanasia, and so they were not prosecuted for that act.

AARON MATÉ: Pete, I just want to clarify, you said earlier that you find cruelty 100 percent of the time?

PETE: One hundred percent of the time. You know, I mean, it would stand to reason that there has to be a farm out there, at least one, that’s not breaking the law. That would stand to reason. The only thing I can tell you is that I have not found it yet.

So, I have worked at a—for example, just with the dairies alone, I’ve worked at Bettencourt Dairy in Idaho, which at the one site that I was at, one of their numerous sites, there were about 6,000 cows, and, you know, people were breaking the law every day there. I’ve worked at the Conklin Dairy Farm in Ohio. It was a family-owned farm, had about 200 cows, the most sadistic animal abuse that I’ve ever seen. And I’ve worked at the E6 Cattle Ranch in Texas, also family-owned, and the owner was convicted for cruelty to animals. Another MFA investigator worked at a large dairy in New York, and he worked alongside a mechanic. And it just so happened that the one worker that he was working alongside was also convicted for breaking the law for cruelty to animals.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to talk about one of the dairies, Pete. You recently infiltrated Bettencourt Dairies in Idaho and released some shocking footage. The video shows a cow being dragged on the floor by a chain attached from her neck to a moving tractor. It also shows dairy workers viciously beating and shocking cows and violently twisting their tails. Additionally, your hidden camera captured unsafe and unsanitary conditions, including feces-covered floors that cause cows to regularly slip, fall and injure themselves. There were also sick and injured cows suffering from open wounds, broken bones and infected udders left to suffer without veterinary care. Now, Bettencourt Dairies is Idaho’s largest dairy operation and cheese supplier for Kraft and Burger King. Three of the dairy workers were charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty due to your investigation. Tell us exactly what happened, how you got the video out, how you made it public, and who these people were who were convicted.

PETE: Absolutely. So, the entire purpose behind the Bettencourt investigation was that—I guess I should start by saying that my identity has been made public by the Animal Agriculture Alliance, and they’ve been trying to prevent me from getting undercover at farms and slaughterhouses. So the whole reason that I went to Idaho is specifically because Mercy for Animals hired me to just work at any facility that I could. And so I went to Idaho because I’ve never been there, and I chose the dairy industry because I hadn’t worked at a dairy in over two years. On that alone, I decided to go apply at Bettencourt. They were the first place to hire me.

And within 45 minutes of arriving on my first day, there was the—I filmed the incident that you discussed of someone putting a chain around a downed cow’s neck and dragging her out of a stall. The manager, Felipe, of that site, the Dry Creek Dairy site, he shocked the downed cow about 50 times with a hand-held device. He was the one who put the chain around her neck. I still don’t understand why he was not charged for that crime. But there it was, on my first day, that management was involved in the most hideous act of abuse that I saw while I was there.

The investigation lasted three weeks, and there were acts of unnecessary cruelty, of people beating and punching cows in the face and punching them in the eyes, and so forth, throughout that time. Once we felt that we had established a pattern of abuse and showed everyone who was involved in it, though no cow during that time had an imminent threat to their so that we felt we needed to cut the case immediately, we then went to law enforcement.

AMYGOODMAN: And what happened to these people? Are they still working in the plant, though they were charged with misdemeanor? And the companies that use Bettencourt, the largest plant in the state?

PETE: Right. So, I guess first I should say Felipe, to my knowledge, is still running that site. He was not charged. There were three workers that were charged. Two fled. One was convicted. And the company itself was not charged.

So, the Bettencourts said that, you know, they’re going to put up cameras and that they’re going to have people sign a policy saying, "Don’t abuse animals." I want to make this very clear: Most facilities that I’ve worked at, you have to sign a form that says you will not abuse animals. I have worked at more than one facility that has cameras that are operating there. I don’t know who’s behind the camera, but certainly they’ve never uncovered anything that I’ve been able to find with my hidden cameras. So I don’t believe that that’s going to actually do anything to minimize the amount of illegal cruelty at Bettencourt.

AARON MATÉ: Pete, I also want to ask you about what you uncovered at the Martin Creek Kennel in Arkansas. Your investigation was featured in the 2006 HBO documentary called Dealing Dogs. Let’s go to a clip. And again, a warning to our viewers: These images are very graphic.

PETE: Up at the trench, there’s a table sitting right next to the trench with a bloody knife on top. And the whole table is just covered in dried blood. The area around the table is just littered with dog organs.

These are lines of trenches. Started out here, and he keeps digging new trenches as he fills them up. More dogs, whole dogs. OK, this dog here had been cut open.

AARON MATÉ: That’s a clip from the 2006 HBO documentary Dealing Dogs. Pete, talk about what you found there.

PETE: Sure. So, that facility, they had been suspected for a long time of abusing animals. And it was a place that was licensed by the USDA to sell random-source dogs and cats to research labs. That’s called a Class B license. A few of those still exist, and most of them now buy their dogs and cats from pounds. So they go to the local shelter and then—or animal control facility, and then they’ll resell them to research. That facility was the largest in operation, having over 600 dogs at a time, over 100 cats at a time. And they would sell to universities for research all over the country. Not only were they abusing the dogs on a daily basis, but they were also getting a lot of stolen pets.

That facility was eventually shut down. The U.S. attorney’s office got involved, because they were also involved in a felony fraud. They had a veterinarian pre-signing their interstate health certificates without checking the dogs. And so, for every one of those that crossed state lines, it was a felony. It’s kind of like hitting Al Capone for tax evasion. But anyway, all of the animals were rescued once the U.S. attorney’s office raided the facility, and they were permanently shut down.

That said, there’s an interesting point about that case, which is that, you know, you look at—you look at a facility like that, it’s licensed by the government, and you wonder how can they be doing these things. Like, how can all of these farms and slaughterhouses be breaking the law, and no one but undercover activists finds out about it? Well, at Martin Creek Kennel, I watched a USDA inspection. I watched two federal inspectors walk through the facility, and they did not find a single dog that was dying of open wounds that I was able to document that day at that facility. I’ve seen federal inspections at several facilities that I’ve worked at, and they don’t find any of the crimes that I’ve uncovered while I’m there. So, I applaud the USDA for all of the action that they take, and I’m not trying to—I’m not trying to come down on them. But what I’m trying to say is that an inspection alone or third-party verification does not find the kind of criminal activity that an undercover investigation will find. And there is no law enforcement agency that exists in this country to do undercover work of puppy mills, factory farms and slaughterhouses.

AMYGOODMAN: Pete—

PETE: It’s up to nonprofit groups.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the so-called ag-gag bills that would criminalize the undercover work you do? Republican State Senator David Hinkins of Utah told his local station, KSL-TV, he doesn’t understand opposition to the so-called ag-gag bills. Hinkins said, quote, "If a wife were abusing her husband, we wouldn’t sneak into their living room and set up a hidden camera. We don’t want people mistreating animals. ... There are authorities they can contact. They don’t need to be detectives or the Pink Panther sneaking around." Your response?

PETE: Two things. Number one, animals cannot speak for themselves. So, of course, domestic violence is a complicated issue, but ultimately, you can question a battered spouse and try to get the truth from them. You cannot ask an animal, "Who kicked you?" or "Who’s neglecting you?"

The second thing—and I hesitate to say this because I have so much respect for law enforcement, and we’ve seen so much cooperation from law enforcement especially in the last few years, but corruption and apathy from law enforcement still is a big problem that we find when we’re dealing with animal cases. And if you’re a cop, and if you hear that, and that shocks you, it’s because you’re a good cop. But I can’t tell you how many times it is that we find clear violations of the law, and the local authorities won’t do anything. And it’s tough. You know, it’s very hard, if you’re a police officer in a rural county, you go to church with, and you live alongside, or you’re involved in the same business as the people who some activist comes in and starts showing conditions that, you know, they point out are illegal, but that you may—you may do yourself, or your friends may do themselves.

AMYGOODMAN: Pete, how would the ag-gag bills—

PETE: So that makes it a very complicated issue.

AMYGOODMAN: —affect you and your work?

PETE: They would make it illegal for me to do my job.

AMYGOODMAN: How?

PETE: It’s pure and simple. Well, so, the ag-gag laws generally say that if you document conditions at a facility, if you take a photograph or video of an animal agriculture facility, you’re breaking the law.

What they’ll also say—and this is the most clever—is they’ll say that if you see an act of illegal abuse, you have to report it within 24 hours. That’s misleading. It’s misleading because if you just show illegal activity from one individual, you can’t then show who else is involved in that illegal activity. And when one person is busted—and I absolutely swear to this—they’re not going to—it’s not going to stop other people from breaking the law. It’s going to let everyone else know they need to be more careful about how they do it, or they just need to make sure that they’re more careful about who they hire.

The second thing is that it’s not always clear what is illegal. The first dairy that I worked at, I saw someone kick a cow right in the side of her head to try and get her to stand. I documented it, thought it was illegal. Turns out, it’s perfectly normal to try to do to a cow to make her stand, that the first thing you should do is kick her right in the side of the head or the neck. When I saw people hanging crippled sows to death in Ohio, I assumed that surely that’s illegal. In fact, it looked sadistic. Turns out that’s perfectly legal. So you don’t always know.

AMYGOODMAN: And so, what happens when you get to continue to record? What is your point that when you turn it in after 24 hours, it hurts what you do?

PETE: Well, so let’s say that you go to a facility, and you believe that someone has—in fact, let’s set it up as best we can. Let’s say you see an act that you believe is illegal, someone admits that it’s illegal, and you have an attorney standing by within 24 hours to tell you it’s illegal. You’re very unlikely to meet all three of those conditions. You are then missing out on any pattern of abuse to determine if this is a one-off incident. You’re then missing out on an opportunity to determine if anyone else is involved in breaking the law. And you’re missing out on an opportunity to find out if management at that facility is aware of this, to see if it’s more of a systemic problem, like we found at Bettencourt and like we found at multiple facilities when we do these investigations. So it really hinders—it prevents you from working a criminal case.

AMYGOODMAN: Pete, you wanted to be a police officer when you were young?

PETE: Yes, absolutely. That’s the reason that I started doing this. I wanted to go into law enforcement, but, you know, I realized there’s a lot of people that are going into law enforcement, and there’s very few people doing this. And there is just no such thing as a cop whose sole job is to go undercover to look out for farmed animals or for dogs in puppy mills. So I decided to combine my two passions, since I was an animal rights activist and I wanted to be a cop, and try and do this job.

AARON MATÉ: And, Pete, since these ag-gag laws have been passed, have you stopped your work in any of the states where they have gone into effect?

PETE: Yes, I have. The main group that I work for is Mercy for Animals. They are an extremely gutsy group. They are extremely professional. And they are very, very focused on not only campaigning for animal welfare, but for finding illegal activity on farms and slaughterhouses. It’s why I love working for them. And they do everything completely legally. So, any states where the ag-gag laws have passed, it’s a no-go to work there.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you for being with us. Pete is the name he asked us to use; it’s not his real name, though he does use his real name when he goes undercover; is an undercover animal rights investigator who has secretly captured animal abuse on farms and slaughterhouses. He has released the footage to groups such as Mercy for Animals, helping spark national outcry and charges against abusers. He’s using the pseudonym to conceal his identity, not disclosing his whereabouts, so he can continue to get hired by unknowing slaughterhouses, farms and other facilities suspected of animal abuse. HBO and others have used his video in their documentaries.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll have a debate on the so-called ag-gag bills. Stay with us.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400Debate: After Activists Covertly Expose Animal Cruelty, Should They Be Targeted With "Ag-Gag" Laws?http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/9/debate_after_activists_covertly_expose_animal
tag:democracynow.org,2013-04-09:en/story/cdf576 AARON MATÉ: We turn now to a debate on the so-called ag-gag bills that would criminalize undercover filming on farms and at slaughterhouses. Five states have already passed ag-gag laws. North Carolina has just become the latest state to consider such a law, joining Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont.
AMY GOODMAN : For a discussion on these so-called ag-gag laws, we&#8217;re joined by two guests. Will Potter, freelance reporter who&#8217;s been covering the bills and ALEC for years, the American Legislative Exchange Council, he runs the blog GreenIsTheNewRed.com . He&#8217;s also the author of Green is the New Red: An Insider&#8217;s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege . And we&#8217;re joined by Emily Meredith, the communications director for the Animal Agriculture Alliance. The group&#8217;s annual summit will be held next month with a heavy focus on the undercover animal cruelty videos and the ag-gag laws trying to block them. The summit&#8217;s theme is &quot;Activists at the Door: Protecting Animals, Farms, Food &amp; Consumer Confidence.&quot; Both guests are joining us from Washington, D.C.
Let us begin with Emily Meredith. Can you talk about the—
EMILY MEREDITH : Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN : Morning. It&#8217;s good to have you with us—the Animal Agriculture Alliance and what these laws are that are being often successfully passed around the country?
EMILY MEREDITH : Sure. Well, the Animal Agriculture Alliance is the largest national coalition of individual farmers and ranchers, veterinarians, processing facilities and a host of national organizations representing basically every protein group. And we work to make sure that there&#8217;s a unified voice communicating and engaging with consumers and helping them understand where their food comes from.
And this farm protection legislation, which has been termed ag-gag legislation by the activist community, is extremely important because these undercover videos are harmful to the farm owners where these videos are taped, the farm families that work those farms day in and day out, and the animal agriculture industry truly as a whole. And these videos damage their reputations. They bring harsh criticism. And many of these videos have found no legitimate instances of abuse, but rather use manipulated footage. They show false narrative of the images that are being shown. And they&#8217;re meant to shock and awe consumers and to really highlight conduct that the animal activist groups want to put an end to the entire industry. They want to end the animal agriculture industry. And that&#8217;s what these videos are about. And that&#8217;s why legislation like this is so important. It is because this legislation is meant to protect the right of these people to continue to operate their farms and ranches and to continue to provide food to this hungry country and the world.
AARON MATÉ: Will Potter, you&#8217;ve covered this issue extensively. Your thoughts on what are called the ag-gag laws or farm protection laws?
WILL POTTER : Well, there is certainly a lot of truth to what you just said. I mean, these undercover investigations have created a lot of distrust with the industry and really questioned where people are getting their meat and animal products from. It&#8217;s important to point out, though, that these investigations have also led to criminal charges across the country. They&#8217;ve led to the largest meat recall in U.S. history. They&#8217;ve led to ballot initiatives across the country in which consumers are speaking out.
And to frame this as something by animal welfare groups who are seeking to abolish animal agriculture is just disingenuous. The people that are opposed to these bills are people like the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, the Teamsters, the AFL - CIO , the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Press Photographers Association. These are not radical extremist animal rights activists; these are everyone who cares about where their food comes from and whether or not they have a right to know about what they&#8217;re buying.
AMY GOODMAN : Emily Meredith, your response?
EMILY MEREDITH : Well, I would say that these videos are—they&#8217;re showing families, they&#8217;re showing farms and slaughterhouses, and they&#8217;re basically making them guilty without ever giving them the opportunity to address the allegations that are levied in those videos. They&#8217;re not giving them the opportunity to take corrective action. I know that Pete mentioned that they often turn the videos over to the authorities. That is completely—I think that&#8217;s disingenuous, when in fact they actually release these videos direct to the media. They send them direct to companies. One of the farms where—that Pete mentioned, they sent the video direct to CNN and to Burger King. And it was in fact the farm owners that turned that footage over to the state prosecutor and took responsibility, fired five of his employees, at least five of his employees, and turned that footage over. And I think that&#8217;s—that&#8217;s disingenuous.
If you truly care about animal welfare, you&#8217;re not going to wait even a minute to report animal abuse. You&#8217;re going to see it, you&#8217;re going to stop it, and you&#8217;re going to say something. And I think that&#8217;s very important to note. This footage is taken for weeks or months. It&#8217;s held, and it&#8217;s released at a politically opportune or strategically conceived time. And it&#8217;s used—these videos are used for these groups&#8217; fundraising purposes. I know Pete mentioned Mercy for Animals. Yes, they release these videos, and they release them under a big &quot;donate now&quot; button. And I think that&#8217;s really and truly disingenuous. And that&#8217;s why this legislation is so crucial.
AMY GOODMAN : Will Potter, your response?
WILL POTTER : I think it&#8217;s interesting to say something like the activists are making people who abuse animals and are facing felony animal cruelty charges, in many cases, making them guilty. I mean, it completely restructures the debate away from the people who are actually committing the abuses.
And I think it&#8217;s important to point out also that we can&#8217;t limit this discussion to what&#8217;s being described as criminal activity. Although these investigations have certainly led to criminal charges across the country, much of what these investigators are documenting are actually standard industry practices. I think most people would be shocked to learn that there is not one federal law that protects farm animals during their lives. There are some legislation that protects animals as they&#8217;re being transported and some legislation that protects animals as they&#8217;re being slaughtered, but that exempts poultry, which are about 90 to 95 percent of animals that are killed. So, to put this in another way, there&#8217;s about nine billion animals killed every year for food in this country by an industry with virtually no government oversight and no accountability. These undercover investigators are really the only meaningful way that American consumers have a right to know how their food is produced and to have a check and balance on a multibillion-dollar industry.
AARON MATÉ: Emily, does the industry have safeguards in place that you think counter what Will is saying is needed, which is people investigating and doing monitoring of these farms?
EMILY MEREDITH : Oh, for sure. I mean, I think the last thing that the industry needs is activist groups that really wish to see a vegan world, quote-unquote, &quot;policing&quot; them. Some of the measures that are in place are every employee that is hired on a farm or ranch is required to sign a document saying if they see abuse, they will report it to managers, to farm owners, and even to local authorities. There are a lot of farms, ranches, processing facilities, that have video cameras in place that run every day, that a quality assurance manager or some sort of manager is reviewing that footage. There&#8217;s trainings in place. A lot of these facilities train in multiple languages to make sure that their employees understand how to properly handle animals and care for them.
And I think the bottom line to really note here is that these—98.2 percent of farms and ranches in this country are family-owned. I think that the term &quot;factory farm&quot; gets thrown around a lot, and that&#8217;s a completely—again, a term made up by—a very catchy term made up by the activist community, whereas, in reality, the majority of farms and ranches in this country are family-owned. And these farm families, they truly care about their animals. And they want—it&#8217;s not in their best interest to have abuse allegations levied against them. They want to make sure that every one of their employees is doing the right thing, that they&#8217;re doing the right thing, and that they can continue to do what they love to do and what has been in their families for generations. Some of these farms and ranches have been in operation for a hundred years. They don&#8217;t want to have any allegations against them that would allege animal cruelty, because that is—A, it&#8217;s bad for business, but, B, it goes against what they were raised to do. And I think that that&#8217;s really important to note. And we need to remember that these people are producing our food every day.
AMY GOODMAN : Will Potter, what about Emily Meredith&#8217;s points that the vast majority of farms are family farms and that they successfully monitor themselves?
WILL POTTER : It&#8217;s completely nonexistent. Old MacDonald&#8217;s farm just does not exist anymore. We&#8217;re talking about nine to 10 billion animals raised for food every year. These are not little red barns dotting the countryside. These are industrial operations, in some cases with a million birds on a single farm. To say that this is a family business is just misrepresenting how the entire animal agriculture industry functions. This is a multibillion-dollar industry that, as I said, has virtually no safeguards, no oversight from the government. And a handful of activists and whistleblowers have really rattled the industry to its core.
And I think what that really represents is that as these investigations are exposed, they not only lead to criminal charges, but they&#8217;ve really changed the nature of the public debate. Most people have been led to believe exactly what Ms. Meredith said, that there are these little red barns and Old MacDonald raising animals for American consumption. But that just doesn&#8217;t happen. So people, when they see this footage, when they become aware of how this industry operates, they&#8217;re appalled. And I think that really reflects the sea change in the national dialogue right now.
AMY GOODMAN : Will Potter, I want to ask you about how journalists will be impacted by these bills, but first let&#8217;s turn to this 2011 report by ABC&#8217;s Brian Ross on McDonald&#8217;s dropping a large McMuffin egg supplier. The fast food chain fired Sparboe Farms following allegations of animal cruelty.
BRIAN ROSS : In the wake of an ABC News investigation, McDonald&#8217;s has fired Sparboe Farms, citing undercover video made by an animal rights group, Mercy for Animals, showing mindless animal cruelty, most of which is too graphic to broadcast.
AMY GOODMAN : Will Potter, can you comment on this?
WILL POTTER : I mean, particularly what concerns me as a journalist is exactly what you just described. I mean, these bills are so broad that they wrap up, in some cases, photography and video documentation. They wrap up anyone who distributes or possesses that footage. And even the reformed bills, as they&#8217;ve been presented, which focus on misrepresenting yourself in job application or the mandatory reporting provisions, those still put reporters at risk.
I think people need to understand that there&#8217;s a long history of investigative journalism in this country, I mean, dating back to Nellie Bly, who pretended to be insane in order to expose systemic abuses in insane asylums across the country, for reporters to document these types of abuses in this way. In addition to that, not everyone who is exposing and making the news has congressional press credentials. We&#8217;re in a climate right now where some of the national headlines are made not by investigative journalists, but by people that are taking it upon themselves to document this kind of corruption.
AMY GOODMAN : Give us examples of what has been exposed that has led to the closing of factories, changes in policy.
WILL POTTER : I think it&#8217;s really reflective of this national climate to see what happened in North Carolina this last week. A fifth person, a fifth employee of Butterball pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges. And on that same day, the North Carolina Legislature introduced a new bill that criminalizes the very investigation that led to those criminal charges, and also led to the ousting of a top Ag official in North Carolina on obstruction of justice. I think that really wraps up, you know, the totality of what we&#8217;re talking about, that the mechanisms in place that are meant to be safeguards in many ways themselves are corrupt. And it&#8217;s taken undercover investigators to expose that and to allow for this dialogue of what needs to happen to reform.
AMY GOODMAN : And a point that Emily Meredith made about if you see abuse, if you do get in there and you do film it, you should have to turn the film over within 24 hours, what is your response to that, Will Potter?
WILL POTTER : I think there are a couple things to point out. One is that this doesn&#8217;t allow for a systemic or a multi-abuse pattern to be exposed. For instance, no one would go to the FBI or to the police and say that they should bust the mob after catching one illegal activity. And I think that&#8217;s really the same situation here. Do we want to see one aberrant behavior, or do we want to see what is happening every single day on these farms to get a complete picture of what&#8217;s happening and how our food is being processed?
I think the second thing to think about is that many of the people who work on these facilities are some of the most vulnerable populations in the country. These are people that in many cases are not native English speakers, that are not familiar and don&#8217;t have access to an attorney within 24 hours. So for them to make the decision to report this information and put their livelihood on the line cannot be forced on them in such a short amount of time. That really places an unfair burden on the workers. And that&#8217;s why groups like the Teamsters and the AFL - CIO have opposed this, as well.
AARON MATÉ: Emily Meredith, many points to respond to here. Will Potter&#8217;s point that forcing this quick disclosure puts an unfair burden on workers?
EMILY MEREDITH : I think that&#8217;s blatantly untrue. I think that it&#8217;s easy for the activist community to sit there and say it puts an unfair burden on workers, when, in reality, I think it puts an equal burden when they cut and run after obtaining the footage that they want and release it to the mainstream media. I mean, you&#8217;re showing workers there that are most—in most cases, not doing anything wrong, are complying with standard industry practices, and you&#8217;re releasing that footage direct to the public. So, where are the activists in doing what Mr. Potter just suggested, in helping those workers get attorneys and making sure that they&#8217;re represented? They&#8217;re not doing that.
And I think it&#8217;s easy for them to sit there and say that—you know, make all these excuses why their videos are necessary; however, I think we need to remember that these videos play a huge part in their bottom lines. They&#8217;re a huge part to their fundraising campaigns, and it&#8217;s how these organizations, like Mercy for Animals, like the Humane Society, like PETA—that&#8217;s how these organizations stay in business and continue to operate.
And I would also say that there&#8217;s nothing in the Constitution that would give you a right to videotape on private property. In fact, there&#8217;s many states that have—that prohibit videotaping in any sort of business, not just on farms and ranches, not just in agriculture. And I think that that—that&#8217;s a very crucial point, because just because you&#8217;re an undercover activist doesn&#8217;t give you the right to go onto someone&#8217;s private property. And in many cases, these are family farms, as I&#8217;ve mentioned before. Animals are 100 feet from the family home. It doesn&#8217;t give you a right, just because you want to—you think you want to expose something, to go onto that private property and to videotape.
And these farms and ranches, they do need protection. In fact, I will say one more thing, if I may, which is that the first of these bills which—the first of these recent bills was actually written at the kitchen table of former Iowa Representative Annette Sweeney. This bill, she had farm—she&#8217;s a farmer herself. She raises animals. And she had other farm families coming to her, saying, &quot;What&#8217;s our recourse? You know, these videos are spreading misinformation. They&#8217;re using false footage. They&#8217;re using footage that wasn&#8217;t even obtained in our facility. And we don&#8217;t have a recourse, and we need to do something about it.&quot; And so, she sat down with other legislators at her kitchen table and drafted the first one of these bills to protect families like hers. And I think that that&#8217;s what we really need to remember, is that—
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s go—let&#8217;s go to who is writing the legislation. And here I want to ask you about the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC , in pushing these state bills. ALEC spokesperson Bill Meierling told the Associated Press, quote, &quot;At the end of the day it&#8217;s about personal property rights or the individual right to privacy. You wouldn&#8217;t want me coming into your home with a hidden camera.&quot; Let&#8217;s put this question to Will Potter, because Emily Meredith raised it, as well, that people don&#8217;t have a right to go onto private property and film.
WILL POTTER : Well, if I were keeping pigs in my home their entire lives and not allowing them to turn around, keeping chickens in battery cages and debeaking them, or docking pigs&#8217; tails without anesthesia, I probably wouldn&#8217;t want anyone coming into my home and documenting that, either.
I think what is missing the point here is that the American Legislative Exchange Council is behind a coordinated effort, dating back to about 2003, in which they&#8217;ve drafted model legislation criminalizing a wide range of activity, from nonviolent civil disobedience to the undercover investigations of animal welfare groups as terrorism. And over the next 10 years, they&#8217;ve used that legislation around the country. And in—the recent attempts of ag-gag bills are really an extension of that. This is a concerted effort by corporations to silence their opposition, and it&#8217;s bankrolled by some of the most powerful industries on the planet.
AMY GOODMAN : Where does ALEC fit into this picture, this organization where corporate heads and legislators get together and write legislation?
WILL POTTER : So, I think most of your listeners are familiar with ALEC , because Democracy Now! has reported on it quite a bit. But the way the group functions is by taking thousands of dollars of donations from corporations, and in exchange for that money, these corporations are allowed to draft model legislation. And these model bills are introduced around the country without any fingerprints tying them to the industries that crafted or are attempting to craft the law, so most people have no idea where these bills are actually coming from. Meanwhile, ALEC mobilizes lawmakers around the country. For instance, in Utah, my reporting on the ag-gag bill there showed that the Senate, as it—the Utah Senate that passed the bill, over half of the supporting votes came from ALEC members. I mean, we really have no idea of the true scope of this organization, but it&#8217;s clear, especially with this wave of ag-gag bills, that ALEC bills has been a driving force behind these attempts to criminalize activists.
AMY GOODMAN : Emily Meredith, how involved is ALEC in the legislation that&#8217;s passing in state after state, most recently this week introduced in North Carolina?
EMILY MEREDITH : Well, I&#8217;ll go back to what I said earlier, which was the first recent one of these bills was really written around the kitchen table by someone who is a farmer herself, who has a vested interest in this, and who was approached by other farm families, and looking for a recourse for these videos, looking for someone to help them protect themselves, really. And I think that it doesn&#8217;t matter where the impetus is coming from, and I would—I would strive to say that the impetus is coming from farm families themselves.
But the true point is that, you know, as Will Potter pointed out, well, I—you know, I don&#8217;t think you would want me videotaping that. Well, you know, I think that that is—that is untrue. I think that there&#8217;s a lot of farmers&#8217; and ranchers&#8217; organizations, like the Animal Agriculture Alliance, who are striving to be transparent and to help consumers understand where their food comes from. However, we&#8217;re running up against staunch opposition and activist organizations, like Mercy for Animals, activists, journalists, who are going in and who are really mistreating this video footage, who are taking footage for weeks and months, they&#8217;re holding it, then they&#8217;re releasing it, as I said before, at a politically opportune time. And this video footage is often spliced together from footage from 10, 20 years ago that they use in these videos. They&#8217;re running a false narrative with a lot of these images. And even—
AMY GOODMAN : Will Potter, that&#8217;s a serious charge that Emily Meredith is making, that most of it is false, the videotape.
WILL POTTER : Yeah, it is a serious charge, and I would love to see any evidence of that. I&#8217;m sure prosecutors would, as well, as they&#8217;ve brought criminal charges in these cases, not from footage from 10 or 20 years ago, but of things that happened months ago, that have immediately led to criminal investigations. If there are allegations of any of this footage being manipulated or staged or doctored in any way, I would love to see it, from anyone in the industry. But they continue to make these claims without any evidence as to what is actually happening.
To talk about transparency in this way is really interesting to me, because this industry is behind attempts to keep consumers in the dark, and then the Animal Agriculture Alliance, for example, is holding a conference about those attempts, and then, at the same time, denying access to reporters such as myself—my credentials were refused—who are trying to attend and learn about their efforts. So at every step of the way, they&#8217;re trying to keep the public in the dark, they&#8217;re trying to keep consumers in the dark, and they&#8217;re trying to make all of us unaware of what&#8217;s actually happening.
AMY GOODMAN : Emily Meredith, your response? And the significance of the meeting that you&#8217;ll be having in Virginia, coming up on May 1st to 2nd at the Westin Arlington Gateway, &quot;Activists at the Door: Protecting Animals, Farms, Food &amp; Consumer Confidence&quot;?
EMILY MEREDITH : Well, I want to say first that the industry is not trying to keep consumers in the dark. They have made a lot of efforts to be more transparent, to communicate about things. And in fact, these bills—I want to emphasize this point—mandate reporting. They want you to see it, they want you to stop it, and they want you to say something. They don&#8217;t want you to hold the footage. As I said before, a lot of this footage is never even turned over to prosecuting authorities, until the farm families and the owners of these facilities turn it over themselves. And that has happened in numerous cases.
The second thing I want to make a point about is that after a lot of these videos are released, these farms themselves are going to independent review panels—excuse me—and having these videos reviewed by known humane handling experts, like, for instance, Dr. Temple Grandin. And I want to make this point very clear. When that review panel asks for the full footage—let&#8217;s say that the activist organization was in a facility for three weeks or three months—when that review panel, which—
AMY GOODMAN : Five seconds.
EMILY MEREDITH : —which includes experts, they ask for the full footage, they&#8217;re not turned that full footage over. The activist community does not want that review panel to see the full footage. And in my mind, that&#8217;s because there really is—
AMY GOODMAN : We have to leave it there. Emily Meredith, I want to thank you for being with us, of the Animal Agriculture Alliance, and Will Potter, freelance reporter, author of Green is the New Red . We will look at the case of Daniel McGowan after our show, and we&#8217;ll post it at democracynow.org. AARON MATÉ: We turn now to a debate on the so-called ag-gag bills that would criminalize undercover filming on farms and at slaughterhouses. Five states have already passed ag-gag laws. North Carolina has just become the latest state to consider such a law, joining Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont.

AMYGOODMAN: For a discussion on these so-called ag-gag laws, we’re joined by two guests. Will Potter, freelance reporter who’s been covering the bills and ALEC for years, the American Legislative Exchange Council, he runs the blog GreenIsTheNewRed.com. He’s also the author of Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege. And we’re joined by Emily Meredith, the communications director for the Animal Agriculture Alliance. The group’s annual summit will be held next month with a heavy focus on the undercover animal cruelty videos and the ag-gag laws trying to block them. The summit’s theme is "Activists at the Door: Protecting Animals, Farms, Food & Consumer Confidence." Both guests are joining us from Washington, D.C.

Let us begin with Emily Meredith. Can you talk about the—

EMILYMEREDITH: Good morning.

AMYGOODMAN: Morning. It’s good to have you with us—the Animal Agriculture Alliance and what these laws are that are being often successfully passed around the country?

EMILYMEREDITH: Sure. Well, the Animal Agriculture Alliance is the largest national coalition of individual farmers and ranchers, veterinarians, processing facilities and a host of national organizations representing basically every protein group. And we work to make sure that there’s a unified voice communicating and engaging with consumers and helping them understand where their food comes from.

And this farm protection legislation, which has been termed ag-gag legislation by the activist community, is extremely important because these undercover videos are harmful to the farm owners where these videos are taped, the farm families that work those farms day in and day out, and the animal agriculture industry truly as a whole. And these videos damage their reputations. They bring harsh criticism. And many of these videos have found no legitimate instances of abuse, but rather use manipulated footage. They show false narrative of the images that are being shown. And they’re meant to shock and awe consumers and to really highlight conduct that the animal activist groups want to put an end to the entire industry. They want to end the animal agriculture industry. And that’s what these videos are about. And that’s why legislation like this is so important. It is because this legislation is meant to protect the right of these people to continue to operate their farms and ranches and to continue to provide food to this hungry country and the world.

AARON MATÉ: Will Potter, you’ve covered this issue extensively. Your thoughts on what are called the ag-gag laws or farm protection laws?

WILLPOTTER: Well, there is certainly a lot of truth to what you just said. I mean, these undercover investigations have created a lot of distrust with the industry and really questioned where people are getting their meat and animal products from. It’s important to point out, though, that these investigations have also led to criminal charges across the country. They’ve led to the largest meat recall in U.S. history. They’ve led to ballot initiatives across the country in which consumers are speaking out.

And to frame this as something by animal welfare groups who are seeking to abolish animal agriculture is just disingenuous. The people that are opposed to these bills are people like the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Press Photographers Association. These are not radical extremist animal rights activists; these are everyone who cares about where their food comes from and whether or not they have a right to know about what they’re buying.

AMYGOODMAN: Emily Meredith, your response?

EMILYMEREDITH: Well, I would say that these videos are—they’re showing families, they’re showing farms and slaughterhouses, and they’re basically making them guilty without ever giving them the opportunity to address the allegations that are levied in those videos. They’re not giving them the opportunity to take corrective action. I know that Pete mentioned that they often turn the videos over to the authorities. That is completely—I think that’s disingenuous, when in fact they actually release these videos direct to the media. They send them direct to companies. One of the farms where—that Pete mentioned, they sent the video direct to CNN and to Burger King. And it was in fact the farm owners that turned that footage over to the state prosecutor and took responsibility, fired five of his employees, at least five of his employees, and turned that footage over. And I think that’s—that’s disingenuous.

If you truly care about animal welfare, you’re not going to wait even a minute to report animal abuse. You’re going to see it, you’re going to stop it, and you’re going to say something. And I think that’s very important to note. This footage is taken for weeks or months. It’s held, and it’s released at a politically opportune or strategically conceived time. And it’s used—these videos are used for these groups’ fundraising purposes. I know Pete mentioned Mercy for Animals. Yes, they release these videos, and they release them under a big "donate now" button. And I think that’s really and truly disingenuous. And that’s why this legislation is so crucial.

AMYGOODMAN: Will Potter, your response?

WILLPOTTER: I think it’s interesting to say something like the activists are making people who abuse animals and are facing felony animal cruelty charges, in many cases, making them guilty. I mean, it completely restructures the debate away from the people who are actually committing the abuses.

And I think it’s important to point out also that we can’t limit this discussion to what’s being described as criminal activity. Although these investigations have certainly led to criminal charges across the country, much of what these investigators are documenting are actually standard industry practices. I think most people would be shocked to learn that there is not one federal law that protects farm animals during their lives. There are some legislation that protects animals as they’re being transported and some legislation that protects animals as they’re being slaughtered, but that exempts poultry, which are about 90 to 95 percent of animals that are killed. So, to put this in another way, there’s about nine billion animals killed every year for food in this country by an industry with virtually no government oversight and no accountability. These undercover investigators are really the only meaningful way that American consumers have a right to know how their food is produced and to have a check and balance on a multibillion-dollar industry.

AARON MATÉ: Emily, does the industry have safeguards in place that you think counter what Will is saying is needed, which is people investigating and doing monitoring of these farms?

EMILYMEREDITH: Oh, for sure. I mean, I think the last thing that the industry needs is activist groups that really wish to see a vegan world, quote-unquote, "policing" them. Some of the measures that are in place are every employee that is hired on a farm or ranch is required to sign a document saying if they see abuse, they will report it to managers, to farm owners, and even to local authorities. There are a lot of farms, ranches, processing facilities, that have video cameras in place that run every day, that a quality assurance manager or some sort of manager is reviewing that footage. There’s trainings in place. A lot of these facilities train in multiple languages to make sure that their employees understand how to properly handle animals and care for them.

And I think the bottom line to really note here is that these—98.2 percent of farms and ranches in this country are family-owned. I think that the term "factory farm" gets thrown around a lot, and that’s a completely—again, a term made up by—a very catchy term made up by the activist community, whereas, in reality, the majority of farms and ranches in this country are family-owned. And these farm families, they truly care about their animals. And they want—it’s not in their best interest to have abuse allegations levied against them. They want to make sure that every one of their employees is doing the right thing, that they’re doing the right thing, and that they can continue to do what they love to do and what has been in their families for generations. Some of these farms and ranches have been in operation for a hundred years. They don’t want to have any allegations against them that would allege animal cruelty, because that is—A, it’s bad for business, but, B, it goes against what they were raised to do. And I think that that’s really important to note. And we need to remember that these people are producing our food every day.

AMYGOODMAN: Will Potter, what about Emily Meredith’s points that the vast majority of farms are family farms and that they successfully monitor themselves?

WILLPOTTER: It’s completely nonexistent. Old MacDonald’s farm just does not exist anymore. We’re talking about nine to 10 billion animals raised for food every year. These are not little red barns dotting the countryside. These are industrial operations, in some cases with a million birds on a single farm. To say that this is a family business is just misrepresenting how the entire animal agriculture industry functions. This is a multibillion-dollar industry that, as I said, has virtually no safeguards, no oversight from the government. And a handful of activists and whistleblowers have really rattled the industry to its core.

And I think what that really represents is that as these investigations are exposed, they not only lead to criminal charges, but they’ve really changed the nature of the public debate. Most people have been led to believe exactly what Ms. Meredith said, that there are these little red barns and Old MacDonald raising animals for American consumption. But that just doesn’t happen. So people, when they see this footage, when they become aware of how this industry operates, they’re appalled. And I think that really reflects the sea change in the national dialogue right now.

AMYGOODMAN: Will Potter, I want to ask you about how journalists will be impacted by these bills, but first let’s turn to this 2011 report by ABC’s Brian Ross on McDonald’s dropping a large McMuffin egg supplier. The fast food chain fired Sparboe Farms following allegations of animal cruelty.

BRIANROSS: In the wake of an ABC News investigation, McDonald’s has fired Sparboe Farms, citing undercover video made by an animal rights group, Mercy for Animals, showing mindless animal cruelty, most of which is too graphic to broadcast.

AMYGOODMAN: Will Potter, can you comment on this?

WILLPOTTER: I mean, particularly what concerns me as a journalist is exactly what you just described. I mean, these bills are so broad that they wrap up, in some cases, photography and video documentation. They wrap up anyone who distributes or possesses that footage. And even the reformed bills, as they’ve been presented, which focus on misrepresenting yourself in job application or the mandatory reporting provisions, those still put reporters at risk.

I think people need to understand that there’s a long history of investigative journalism in this country, I mean, dating back to Nellie Bly, who pretended to be insane in order to expose systemic abuses in insane asylums across the country, for reporters to document these types of abuses in this way. In addition to that, not everyone who is exposing and making the news has congressional press credentials. We’re in a climate right now where some of the national headlines are made not by investigative journalists, but by people that are taking it upon themselves to document this kind of corruption.

AMYGOODMAN: Give us examples of what has been exposed that has led to the closing of factories, changes in policy.

WILLPOTTER: I think it’s really reflective of this national climate to see what happened in North Carolina this last week. A fifth person, a fifth employee of Butterball pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges. And on that same day, the North Carolina Legislature introduced a new bill that criminalizes the very investigation that led to those criminal charges, and also led to the ousting of a top Ag official in North Carolina on obstruction of justice. I think that really wraps up, you know, the totality of what we’re talking about, that the mechanisms in place that are meant to be safeguards in many ways themselves are corrupt. And it’s taken undercover investigators to expose that and to allow for this dialogue of what needs to happen to reform.

AMYGOODMAN: And a point that Emily Meredith made about if you see abuse, if you do get in there and you do film it, you should have to turn the film over within 24 hours, what is your response to that, Will Potter?

WILLPOTTER: I think there are a couple things to point out. One is that this doesn’t allow for a systemic or a multi-abuse pattern to be exposed. For instance, no one would go to the FBI or to the police and say that they should bust the mob after catching one illegal activity. And I think that’s really the same situation here. Do we want to see one aberrant behavior, or do we want to see what is happening every single day on these farms to get a complete picture of what’s happening and how our food is being processed?

I think the second thing to think about is that many of the people who work on these facilities are some of the most vulnerable populations in the country. These are people that in many cases are not native English speakers, that are not familiar and don’t have access to an attorney within 24 hours. So for them to make the decision to report this information and put their livelihood on the line cannot be forced on them in such a short amount of time. That really places an unfair burden on the workers. And that’s why groups like the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO have opposed this, as well.

AARON MATÉ: Emily Meredith, many points to respond to here. Will Potter’s point that forcing this quick disclosure puts an unfair burden on workers?

EMILYMEREDITH: I think that’s blatantly untrue. I think that it’s easy for the activist community to sit there and say it puts an unfair burden on workers, when, in reality, I think it puts an equal burden when they cut and run after obtaining the footage that they want and release it to the mainstream media. I mean, you’re showing workers there that are most—in most cases, not doing anything wrong, are complying with standard industry practices, and you’re releasing that footage direct to the public. So, where are the activists in doing what Mr. Potter just suggested, in helping those workers get attorneys and making sure that they’re represented? They’re not doing that.

And I think it’s easy for them to sit there and say that—you know, make all these excuses why their videos are necessary; however, I think we need to remember that these videos play a huge part in their bottom lines. They’re a huge part to their fundraising campaigns, and it’s how these organizations, like Mercy for Animals, like the Humane Society, like PETA—that’s how these organizations stay in business and continue to operate.

And I would also say that there’s nothing in the Constitution that would give you a right to videotape on private property. In fact, there’s many states that have—that prohibit videotaping in any sort of business, not just on farms and ranches, not just in agriculture. And I think that that—that’s a very crucial point, because just because you’re an undercover activist doesn’t give you the right to go onto someone’s private property. And in many cases, these are family farms, as I’ve mentioned before. Animals are 100 feet from the family home. It doesn’t give you a right, just because you want to—you think you want to expose something, to go onto that private property and to videotape.

And these farms and ranches, they do need protection. In fact, I will say one more thing, if I may, which is that the first of these bills which—the first of these recent bills was actually written at the kitchen table of former Iowa Representative Annette Sweeney. This bill, she had farm—she’s a farmer herself. She raises animals. And she had other farm families coming to her, saying, "What’s our recourse? You know, these videos are spreading misinformation. They’re using false footage. They’re using footage that wasn’t even obtained in our facility. And we don’t have a recourse, and we need to do something about it." And so, she sat down with other legislators at her kitchen table and drafted the first one of these bills to protect families like hers. And I think that that’s what we really need to remember, is that—

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s go—let’s go to who is writing the legislation. And here I want to ask you about the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, in pushing these state bills. ALEC spokesperson Bill Meierling told the Associated Press, quote, "At the end of the day it’s about personal property rights or the individual right to privacy. You wouldn’t want me coming into your home with a hidden camera." Let’s put this question to Will Potter, because Emily Meredith raised it, as well, that people don’t have a right to go onto private property and film.

WILLPOTTER: Well, if I were keeping pigs in my home their entire lives and not allowing them to turn around, keeping chickens in battery cages and debeaking them, or docking pigs’ tails without anesthesia, I probably wouldn’t want anyone coming into my home and documenting that, either.

I think what is missing the point here is that the American Legislative Exchange Council is behind a coordinated effort, dating back to about 2003, in which they’ve drafted model legislation criminalizing a wide range of activity, from nonviolent civil disobedience to the undercover investigations of animal welfare groups as terrorism. And over the next 10 years, they’ve used that legislation around the country. And in—the recent attempts of ag-gag bills are really an extension of that. This is a concerted effort by corporations to silence their opposition, and it’s bankrolled by some of the most powerful industries on the planet.

AMYGOODMAN: Where does ALEC fit into this picture, this organization where corporate heads and legislators get together and write legislation?

WILLPOTTER: So, I think most of your listeners are familiar with ALEC, because Democracy Now! has reported on it quite a bit. But the way the group functions is by taking thousands of dollars of donations from corporations, and in exchange for that money, these corporations are allowed to draft model legislation. And these model bills are introduced around the country without any fingerprints tying them to the industries that crafted or are attempting to craft the law, so most people have no idea where these bills are actually coming from. Meanwhile, ALEC mobilizes lawmakers around the country. For instance, in Utah, my reporting on the ag-gag bill there showed that the Senate, as it—the Utah Senate that passed the bill, over half of the supporting votes came from ALEC members. I mean, we really have no idea of the true scope of this organization, but it’s clear, especially with this wave of ag-gag bills, that ALEC bills has been a driving force behind these attempts to criminalize activists.

AMYGOODMAN: Emily Meredith, how involved is ALEC in the legislation that’s passing in state after state, most recently this week introduced in North Carolina?

EMILYMEREDITH: Well, I’ll go back to what I said earlier, which was the first recent one of these bills was really written around the kitchen table by someone who is a farmer herself, who has a vested interest in this, and who was approached by other farm families, and looking for a recourse for these videos, looking for someone to help them protect themselves, really. And I think that it doesn’t matter where the impetus is coming from, and I would—I would strive to say that the impetus is coming from farm families themselves.

But the true point is that, you know, as Will Potter pointed out, well, I—you know, I don’t think you would want me videotaping that. Well, you know, I think that that is—that is untrue. I think that there’s a lot of farmers’ and ranchers’ organizations, like the Animal Agriculture Alliance, who are striving to be transparent and to help consumers understand where their food comes from. However, we’re running up against staunch opposition and activist organizations, like Mercy for Animals, activists, journalists, who are going in and who are really mistreating this video footage, who are taking footage for weeks and months, they’re holding it, then they’re releasing it, as I said before, at a politically opportune time. And this video footage is often spliced together from footage from 10, 20 years ago that they use in these videos. They’re running a false narrative with a lot of these images. And even—

AMYGOODMAN: Will Potter, that’s a serious charge that Emily Meredith is making, that most of it is false, the videotape.

WILLPOTTER: Yeah, it is a serious charge, and I would love to see any evidence of that. I’m sure prosecutors would, as well, as they’ve brought criminal charges in these cases, not from footage from 10 or 20 years ago, but of things that happened months ago, that have immediately led to criminal investigations. If there are allegations of any of this footage being manipulated or staged or doctored in any way, I would love to see it, from anyone in the industry. But they continue to make these claims without any evidence as to what is actually happening.

To talk about transparency in this way is really interesting to me, because this industry is behind attempts to keep consumers in the dark, and then the Animal Agriculture Alliance, for example, is holding a conference about those attempts, and then, at the same time, denying access to reporters such as myself—my credentials were refused—who are trying to attend and learn about their efforts. So at every step of the way, they’re trying to keep the public in the dark, they’re trying to keep consumers in the dark, and they’re trying to make all of us unaware of what’s actually happening.

AMYGOODMAN: Emily Meredith, your response? And the significance of the meeting that you’ll be having in Virginia, coming up on May 1st to 2nd at the Westin Arlington Gateway, "Activists at the Door: Protecting Animals, Farms, Food & Consumer Confidence"?

EMILYMEREDITH: Well, I want to say first that the industry is not trying to keep consumers in the dark. They have made a lot of efforts to be more transparent, to communicate about things. And in fact, these bills—I want to emphasize this point—mandate reporting. They want you to see it, they want you to stop it, and they want you to say something. They don’t want you to hold the footage. As I said before, a lot of this footage is never even turned over to prosecuting authorities, until the farm families and the owners of these facilities turn it over themselves. And that has happened in numerous cases.

The second thing I want to make a point about is that after a lot of these videos are released, these farms themselves are going to independent review panels—excuse me—and having these videos reviewed by known humane handling experts, like, for instance, Dr. Temple Grandin. And I want to make this point very clear. When that review panel asks for the full footage—let’s say that the activist organization was in a facility for three weeks or three months—when that review panel, which—

AMYGOODMAN: Five seconds.

EMILYMEREDITH: —which includes experts, they ask for the full footage, they’re not turned that full footage over. The activist community does not want that review panel to see the full footage. And in my mind, that’s because there really is—

AMYGOODMAN: We have to leave it there. Emily Meredith, I want to thank you for being with us, of the Animal Agriculture Alliance, and Will Potter, freelance reporter, author of Green is the New Red. We will look at the case of Daniel McGowan after our show, and we’ll post it at democracynow.org.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400The Monsanto Protection Act? A Debate on Controversial New Measure Over Genetically Modified Cropshttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/2/the_monsanto_protection_act_a_debate
tag:democracynow.org,2013-04-02:en/story/034125 AARON MATÉ: President Obama outraged food activists last week when he signed into law a spending bill with a controversial rider attached. Critics have dubbed the rider the &quot;Monsanto Protection Act.&quot; That&#8217;s because it effectively says the government must allow the planting of genetically modified crops even if courts rule they pose health risks. The provision calls on the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the USDA , to, quote, &quot;grant temporary permit(s) or temporary deregulation,&quot; unquote, to the crop growers until an environmental review is completed. In other words, plant the GE crop first and assess the impact later.
AMY GOODMAN : One of the biggest supporters of the provision was Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, Monsanto&#8217;s home state. Blunt reportedly crafted the bill&#8217;s language with Monsato&#8217;s help.
On the other side was the lone member of the Senate who&#8217;s also an active farmer, Democrat Jon Tester of Montana. Senator Tester tried to remove the rider when the budget bill made its way through Congress last month. Speaking on the Senate floor, Tester said the provision would undermine judicial oversight and hurt family farmers.
SEN . JON TESTER : The United States Congress is telling the Agricultural Department that even if a court tells you that you&#8217;ve failed to follow the right process and tells you to start over, you must disregard the court&#8217;s ruling and allow the crop to be planted anyway. Not only does this ignore the constitutional idea of separation of powers, but it also lets genetically modified crops take hold across this country, even when a judge finds it violates the law—once again, agribusiness multinational corporations putting farmers as serfs. It&#8217;s a dangerous precedent. Mr. President, it will paralyze the USDA , putting the department in the middle of a battle between Congress and the courts. And the ultimate loser will be our family farmers going about their business and feeding America in the right way.
AARON MATÉ: Well, Senator Tester&#8217;s effort failed, and the rider was included in last month&#8217;s legislation that avoided a government shutdown.
Now that President Obama has signed the spending bill into law, some uncertainty remains over whether it introduces a new policy or whether it codifies existing government practice. But regardless, it&#8217;s galvanized the food justice movement here in the U.S., renewing calls for greater oversight of genetically modified foods and of corporate control of the food chain. And although they may have lost the first round, food activists are gearing up for another fight later this year: Because it was passed as a rider and not as its own legislation, the provision will expire in six months, when it will surely come up again.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, to discuss the so-called &quot;Monsanto Protection Act&quot; and the issue of genetically modified foods, we&#8217;re joined now by two guests.
Gregory Jaffe is director of the Biotechnology Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that addresses food and nutrition issues. He has expressed cautious support for genetically engineered foods.
We&#8217;re also joined by Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food &amp; Water Watch. On Wednesday, her group is releasing a major new report called &quot;Monsanto: A Corporate Profile.&quot; Hauter&#8217;s family runs an organic farm that supplies produce to hundreds of families as part of the growing nationwide community-supported agriculture, or CSA , movement. And she&#8217;s author of the book Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America .
We invited Monsanto also to join this, but they declined to come on the program.
Why don&#8217;t we start with Wenonah Hauter? Can you describe what this rider is and how you believe it got into the spending bill that was passed?
WENONAH HAUTER : Well, this rider is unprecedented and really outrageous interference with our courts and the separation of powers. Now, the biotech industry has been working to get a rider like this into federal legislation since early last spring, when they attempted to attach it to the farm bill, which actually never passed. Now, what happened is, in all of the pressure to pass a spending bill that would allow government agencies to continue operating, the rider was attached, and it went through Senator Barbara Mikulski&#8217;s Appropriations Committee. And she left this rider in the bill, and we hold her responsible. Now, part of the problem with these large spending bills that have to pass very quickly is there&#8217;s a lot of room for this kind of mischief. And these spending bills are a response to the dysfunction in Congress when we can&#8217;t have a normal budgeting process.
And what this rider actually does is it prevents the courts from stepping in under our most important environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act, which gives citizens the right to sue: If they believe that the government is about to make a very large and important decision that will have many impacts, they can sue for judicial review. And this rider will prevent that in the case of genetically engineered crops being planted after a court says that there hasn&#8217;t been a proper environmental assessment. We&#8217;re very concerned about this, because there are a number of crops in the pipeline, like 2,4-D corn, which could actually be impacted by this rider.
Now, because this is a budget bill and the budget bill will run out at the end of this fiscal year, which is September 31st, this bill or this rider will no longer be in effect. However, we should be concerned. Because of the dysfunction in Congress, it&#8217;s possible that the spending bill that was just passed could just be reauthorized for the coming months until a new budget could be debated and passed. So, activists are organizing around the country to put pressure on elected officials to make sure that this doesn&#8217;t happen.
AARON MATÉ: And, Greg Jaffe, you&#8217;re with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Your response to this bill? And does it represent something new here?
GREGORY JAFFE : So, I mean, let me first say that I don&#8217;t support this rider in the bill, but I also—I&#8217;m surprised. I&#8217;m not sure—I don&#8217;t see why it was necessary by the people who thought it needed to be put into law, nor do I think that it changes the current powers or legal authority that the USDA already had or the relationship of the courts and the executive branch.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about why you feel that this bill, Gregory Jaffe, or the rider on the bill doesn&#8217;t change things.
GREGORY JAFFE : OK, so, you have to go back a few years. And the way that USDA regulates genetically engineered crops is they regulate them under the Plant Protection Act, and they ensure that these plants don&#8217;t have any plant pest characteristics or harm agricultural interests. And so they regulate them, and at some point they decide to deregulate them, to decide that they don&#8217;t have any of these risks associated with them, and they can be planted freely by farmers. That is a major federal action, and at the same time they need to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, as Wenonah mentioned, and that requires them doing an assessment of the potential environmental impacts of their—of their action. And that&#8217;s required by all federal agencies when they do any major action that might impact the environment.
Several of these decisions by USDA have been challenged in court. The genetically engineered alfalfa was challenged in court. The genetic-engineered sugar beets was challenged in court. And in both of those cases, the court said that while USDA didn&#8217;t violate the Plant Protection Act, didn&#8217;t make a wrong decision regarding whether the genetically engineered crop was a plant pest, they didn&#8217;t follow the right procedures, and they didn&#8217;t do the proper assessment under the National Environmental Policy Act. And so, the courts, to a large extent, slapped the hand of the—the wrist of the USDA and said, &quot;You have to go back and do that, and until you do that, your decision on the merits on whether the genetically engineered crops harm agriculture needs to be vacated.&quot; And so they went back, and they did that. Now, in the case of the sugar beets, while they were doing that environmental assessment, they issued temporary permits, which they are allowed to do, or temporary deregulation, under the current Plant Protection Act. So they figured out a way to allow farmers to grow that crop in—with conditions imposed, so that they wouldn&#8217;t impact the environment in any way, so that there wouldn&#8217;t be any potential environmental impact while they carried out the National Environmental [Policy] Act&#8217;s environmental assessment.
So, I think that&#8217;s what this provision says. It says that if a court vacates or turns back a decision by the secretary about a genetically engineered crop, that the secretary can go ahead and issue a temporary permit or partially deregulate that crop, with conditions—the language specifically talks about with conditions—that ensure that there&#8217;s no environmental impact, while they go ahead and comply with the court&#8217;s order.
AMY GOODMAN : So, Wenonah Hauter—
GREGORY JAFFE : So, to me—
AMY GOODMAN : —what is the problem here, then, if there has been no change?
WENONAH HAUTER : Well, there—one of the changes is that it has delayed these crops getting into the food system. But I don&#8217;t think we want to get caught up in the technical details of how these crops are laxly approved. What we have here is Monsanto flexing its political muscle, because it&#8217;s not only trying to pass riders like the current one on judicial review, it&#8217;s been trying to get riders on these big spending bills or the farm bill that would actually prohibit any review and would be a rubber stamp of these crops. I think we have to look at the enormous amount of power, political power, that Monsanto has, that it can actually get this kind of precedent-changing rider that could have effects in other areas, because we don&#8217;t like to see this kind of precedent that really prohibits judicial review.
And I think we have to look at how much money that the biotech industry has spent on lobbying. I mean, over the last 10 years, the biotech industry has spent $272 million on lobbying and campaign contributions. They have a hundred lobby shops in Washington. They&#8217;ve hired 13 former members of Congress. They&#8217;ve hired 300 former staffers for the White House and for Congress. And Monsanto alone has spent $63 million over the last 12 years on lobbying and campaign contributions. This is about political muscle and forcing their will on the American people. And if we don&#8217;t put a stop to it here, we&#8217;re going to see many, many more serious violations.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to go to break and come back to this discussion. We&#8217;re talking to Wenonah Hauter, who is author of Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America , and Greg Jaffe, who is with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. We&#8217;re talking about Monsanto, which is the world&#8217;s largest producer of genetically modified seeds. We invited them on; they declined to come on. We&#8217;ll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : Our guests today are Greg Jaffe—he&#8217;s with the Center for Science in the Public Interest—and Wenonah Hauter of Food &amp; Water Watch. Her book is called Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America .
I want to read from Monsanto&#8217;s statement regarding what they call the &quot;Farmer Assurance Provision.&quot; They said, quote, &quot;The point of the Farmer Assurance Provision is to strike a careful balance allowing farmers to continue to plant and cultivate their crops subject to appropriate environmental safeguards, while USDA conducts any necessary further environmental reviews.&quot;
But I want to go to the core of really what you&#8217;re both concerned about, and that is the issue of genetically engineered foods. Greg Jaffe, you&#8217;re not as concerned as Wenonah Hauter. Talk about what genetically engineered foods are and what your thoughts are on them.
GREGORY JAFFE : So, farmers have been growing genetically engineered crops for about 15 years now in the United States. And those varieties of corn and soybeans and cotton and canola were engineered in the laboratory by scientists, where they add a gene from a different organism that imparts a specific trait, a beneficial trait, into that crop, and then that crop is grown, and then food is made from that crop. So we have some crops that have a built-in pesticide, for example, so that we don&#8217;t need to spray a chemical pesticide over the top of those crops. And so, if that&#8217;s a genetically engineered corn, that corn might end up in our food in terms of high-fructose corn syrup or cornstarch or corn flakes, and something along those lines.
The evidence to date on the current crops that are grown in the United States is that those are safe to eat. I think there is a strong international consensus about that. And so, you know, at CSPI , we&#8217;re comfortable in telling people that if you&#8217;re going to be eating food made from those crops that are currently out there, there is not a food safety risk associated with those crops.
That&#8217;s different than the regulatory system, and I think maybe that&#8217;s at the core of some of this. And I think that the—whether we&#8217;re talking about the USDA , the Department of Agriculture or the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency, clearly the U.S. regulatory system and oversight of these crops has not been ideal. And so, at the center, we&#8217;ve been working for a number of years to try to improve that regulatory system, to give the agencies the authority to make sure, before these crops get out there, that they are safe to eat and they are safe for the environment. So while we can say they&#8217;re safe, current ones, for the future ones, we would like the agencies to take a little closer look at them.
AARON MATÉ: Well, let&#8217;s get a response from Wenonah Hauter. Your thoughts on this issue, the argument here being that the science so far shows that it&#8217;s safe, but regulation needs to improve?
WENONAH HAUTER : Well, first of all, I would disagree that there&#8217;s any international agreement that genetically engineered crops are safe. And, in fact, they&#8217;re banned in some countries. And there&#8217;s a lot of concern in places like Europe, where we have the precautionary principle, about genetically engineered foods. And there actually is a body of research that shows that genetically engineered soy and corn have health effects. These studies are feeding studies on animals, which is how this research is generally done. They show liver and kidney impairment—there are a number of studies showing this. Rat pups whose mothers ate genetically engineered soy had high mortality rates. And the genetically engineered hormone that&#8217;s used to—it&#8217;s actually injected into cows so that they produce more milk. Italian research has found that those transgenes actually survive—they survive pasteurization, and they end up in the milk.
So, part of the problem is also that there isn&#8217;t enough research. We have a very lax regulatory system. The technology licensing agreements that Monsanto and other companies have for the biotech products that they develop mean that researchers can&#8217;t legally get a hold of these seeds or grow the crops to actually do testing. And there&#8217;s also not money for the kind of long-term health impact studies that there should be when you&#8217;re doing such a major change in our food system. So I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned.
And we&#8217;re also talking about the immense control over seeds that, well, one company—I mean, we basically have three companies that dominate seeds in the world. So, if you&#8217;re saying that there&#8217;s no problem with genetically engineered seeds, you&#8217;re very narrowly looking at what the impacts could be on the developing world, even farmers here, where Monsanto regularly investigates 500 farmers, approximately, every year and sues them if they don&#8217;t adhere to their contract. Monsanto is very aggressive with farmers. And it&#8217;s very clear that this is simply a way to control seeds and profit from them, and from their co-branded chemicals, their herbicides like Roundup Ready, that are applied along with the genetically engineered crops that are sowed in the fields.
AMY GOODMAN : Your response, Greg Jaffe?
GREGORY JAFFE : I&#8217;m not here to defend Monsanto or the industry. I would agree that they have practices that may not be the best practices out there. They&#8217;re clearly out to make money. There&#8217;s no question about that. But I think we have to separate the company from the merit of these individual crops themselves. And so, when I talk about the safety of the crops, I&#8217;m talking about a case-by-case basis. I can&#8217;t say that the future crops—whether a future crop is going to be safe or not going to be safe. We can only look at what we have today and look at the best scientific evidence out there and say, &quot;Is this genetically engineered corn, this variety that has a built-in pesticide, and is it safe to eat? Is it safe for the environment?&quot; And I do think that the—
AMY GOODMAN : And do you feel it&#8217;s been adequately studied and that the corporate influence over the science hasn&#8217;t prevented that or contaminated the results?
GREGORY JAFFE : I think that, you know, the Food and Drug Administration, the European Food Safety Agency, the WHO—the World Health Organization—the Royal Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, a lot of these international scientific bodies have taken a look, as independent scientists, at not just the information that Monsanto or the biotech developer has provided, but all of the research out there. And I think that—in fact, I think the European Food Safety Agency spent millions of dollars giving independent researchers to do risk assessment work around these genetically engineered crops. And to date, the consensus has been—again, for the current crops that are out there—that those crops are safe to eat and that they have some environmental benefits and that any environmental risks that they have can be mitigated—keeping in mind, obviously, that the agriculture has a huge environmental footprint.
AMY GOODMAN : Do you feel the science is as established as Greg Jaffe is saying, Wenonah Hauter?
WENONAH HAUTER : No, I don&#8217;t think that the science is as established. And I think you have to look at the enormous power that these companies have on our regulatory agencies here and increasingly in Europe. We at Food &amp; Water Watch have a Brussels office, and one of our main jobs there is trying to document the footprint that our U.S. biotech industry is having in Europe, trying to influence their Food Safety Agency and the different governments that—some of which have bans on genetically engineered food.
I think that this is a political issue. This is not about the safety of these crops, because there really has never been long-term research on what the impact is, both on the diet and on the environment. And I&#8217;m concerned when I see that the immense amount of money that Monsanto and other companies are spending on trying to greenwash themselves, when they are able to persuade well-meaning advocates that they&#8217;ve done a good job.
I mean, I think we have to look at Monsanto. They have spent, just over a two-year period, $279 million on advertising, talking about how they want to feed the world and that they&#8217;re really doing this for the benefit of humankind, not to make money. But when you look at what they&#8217;re actually doing, they are making an enormous profit on seeds. Seeds are becoming increasingly expensive. And there are a lot of broader issues besides the few health impact and environment studies that have been done. I mean, we have to look at this in the broadest context of what it means to give one, two, three companies this much control over how seeds are sold and produced and food is produced.
AARON MATÉ: Let&#8217;s talk about the movement to label products containing the ingredients made by these companies. While on the campaign trail in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to label GMO foods, if elected.
SEN . BARACK OBAMA : Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ll do as president. I&#8217;ll immediately implement country-of-origin labeling, because Americans should know where their food comes from. We&#8217;ll let folks know whether their food has been genetically modified, because Americans should know what they&#8217;re buying.
AARON MATÉ: That&#8217;s President Obama speaking in 2007, before he was elected president. Greg Jaffe, do you support the labeling of GMO foods?
GREGORY JAFFE : We support the fact that consumers should have the right to know and should be able to get information about their foods, whether their foods are genetically engineered, whether their foods came from plants that were irradiated or were produced through chemical mutagenesis. So, we do think consumers who want to know about how their foods were produced and where they came from should have a right to do that.
We aren&#8217;t supportive of a mandatory label—putting on mandatory label, at this point, on whether a food was genetically engineered or not. And that is in part because we don&#8217;t want information out there that&#8217;s misleading to the consumer, and also because we want to ensure that the most important information—mandatory labeling is left for the most important information, so information that directly impacts food safety or the health of consumers and nutrition of consumers, keeping in mind, again, that the current genetically engineered crops, the way that most consumers eat those foods, is in highly processed ingredients. So, we eat corn as high-fructose corn syrup or corn oil. And when we produce high-fructose corn syrup or corn oil or sugar from sugar—genetically engineered sugar beets, we eliminate all of the genetically engineered elements. We eliminate the DNA . We eliminate the protein that was produced by that DNA that had been engineered into the plant. And so, biologically and chemically, whether you have two—if you have two jars of corn oil, one from genetically engineered crops and one from non-genetically engineered crops side by side, they are biologically and chemically identical. And so, that is—
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s—
GREGORY JAFFE : That comes into this calculus.
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s get Wenonah Hauter&#8217;s response to this issue of food labeling. Wenonah?
WENONAH HAUTER : Well, consumers want, and should have the right, to know if their food is genetically engineered. And while many of the crops that have been genetically engineered do go into processed food, today we&#8217;re seeing the foods that end up on your plate being either already genetically engineered or in the pipeline for approval. I&#8217;m talking about the GE sweet corn that was approved last year. There has been a multi-year battle over GE salmon. And while we hope the FDA does not approve it, and there has been a huge outpouring of support for not approving it, we&#8217;re concerned that if they move ahead, it will not be labeled.
One of the health effects that we do know happens from eating genetically engineered products is an allergy to protein. So, for the genetically engineered salmon, there could be very serious allergic reactions that could occur, and the food should be labeled. And people believe that they have a right to know what&#8217;s in their food. So I think that voluntary labeling is not enough. And, in fact, what&#8217;s exciting is there is a backlash against the biotech industry. There are campaigns in more than 30 states fighting to get labeling for genetically engineered food. So, even though the biotech industry has spent a boatload of money to stop it, there is a movement growing, and I believe that we will see genetically engineered food labeled in the—
AMY GOODMAN : Wenonah Hauter, just before—
WENONAH HAUTER : —in the near future.
AMY GOODMAN : I know Greg Jaffe has to leave, and I want him to weigh in on genetically engineered salmon. Greg?
GREGORY JAFFE : So, first, I might make a statement that I think, you know, the most important thing, if there&#8217;s any question about whether a food is an allergen or potential allergen because it was genetically engineered, our view is that that should not be allowed on the market. We shouldn&#8217;t use labeling as a surrogate for safety. We shouldn&#8217;t allow a food that is an allergen, that has a new allergen, onto the food supply and label it and let people choose. If there&#8217;s any food safety risk in that food, it shouldn&#8217;t be allowed, which is why we at CSPI advocate for a mandatory premarket approval process of these genetically engineered crops and analysis beforehand, because if there&#8217;s any question of safety, they shouldn&#8217;t go on the market. We don&#8217;t believe we should allow them on the market but, because they&#8217;re an allergen, label them and let people choose. So, I just wanted to clarify that.
The genetically engineered salmon, I think that—I think there&#8217;s been a lot of misunderstanding out there about this genetically engineered salmon that&#8217;s in front of FDA for approval. In my mind, it&#8217;s really just a proof of concept application. The company has requested that this salmon be grown in one facility in Panama for inland tanks, and it&#8217;s only going to produce a small amount of this salmon. Less than 1 percent of the salmon that we would import would be this genetically engineered salmon. So, although I&#8217;m still waiting to see whether FDA does approve that and whether it&#8217;s safe to eat and safe for the environment, assuming that they do that, I think that it&#8217;s going to be a long time before we might see this as a dominant part of the salmon market.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to break, and then we&#8217;re going to continue with Wenonah Hauter on her new book, Foodopoly . Greg Jaffe, I want to thank you so much for being with us, director of the Biotechnology Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and also Wenonah Hauter with Food &amp; Water Watch. We&#8217;ll come back with Wenonah in a minute.
GREGORY JAFFE : Thank you very much. AARON MATÉ: President Obama outraged food activists last week when he signed into law a spending bill with a controversial rider attached. Critics have dubbed the rider the "Monsanto Protection Act." That’s because it effectively says the government must allow the planting of genetically modified crops even if courts rule they pose health risks. The provision calls on the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the USDA, to, quote, "grant temporary permit(s) or temporary deregulation," unquote, to the crop growers until an environmental review is completed. In other words, plant the GE crop first and assess the impact later.

AMYGOODMAN: One of the biggest supporters of the provision was Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, Monsanto’s home state. Blunt reportedly crafted the bill’s language with Monsato’s help.
On the other side was the lone member of the Senate who’s also an active farmer, Democrat Jon Tester of Montana. Senator Tester tried to remove the rider when the budget bill made its way through Congress last month. Speaking on the Senate floor, Tester said the provision would undermine judicial oversight and hurt family farmers.

SEN. JONTESTER: The United States Congress is telling the Agricultural Department that even if a court tells you that you’ve failed to follow the right process and tells you to start over, you must disregard the court’s ruling and allow the crop to be planted anyway. Not only does this ignore the constitutional idea of separation of powers, but it also lets genetically modified crops take hold across this country, even when a judge finds it violates the law—once again, agribusiness multinational corporations putting farmers as serfs. It’s a dangerous precedent. Mr. President, it will paralyze the USDA, putting the department in the middle of a battle between Congress and the courts. And the ultimate loser will be our family farmers going about their business and feeding America in the right way.

AARON MATÉ: Well, Senator Tester’s effort failed, and the rider was included in last month’s legislation that avoided a government shutdown.

Now that President Obama has signed the spending bill into law, some uncertainty remains over whether it introduces a new policy or whether it codifies existing government practice. But regardless, it’s galvanized the food justice movement here in the U.S., renewing calls for greater oversight of genetically modified foods and of corporate control of the food chain. And although they may have lost the first round, food activists are gearing up for another fight later this year: Because it was passed as a rider and not as its own legislation, the provision will expire in six months, when it will surely come up again.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, to discuss the so-called "Monsanto Protection Act" and the issue of genetically modified foods, we’re joined now by two guests.

Gregory Jaffe is director of the Biotechnology Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that addresses food and nutrition issues. He has expressed cautious support for genetically engineered foods.

We’re also joined by Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch. On Wednesday, her group is releasing a major new report called "Monsanto: A Corporate Profile." Hauter’s family runs an organic farm that supplies produce to hundreds of families as part of the growing nationwide community-supported agriculture, or CSA, movement. And she’s author of the book Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America.

We invited Monsanto also to join this, but they declined to come on the program.

Why don’t we start with Wenonah Hauter? Can you describe what this rider is and how you believe it got into the spending bill that was passed?

WENONAHHAUTER: Well, this rider is unprecedented and really outrageous interference with our courts and the separation of powers. Now, the biotech industry has been working to get a rider like this into federal legislation since early last spring, when they attempted to attach it to the farm bill, which actually never passed. Now, what happened is, in all of the pressure to pass a spending bill that would allow government agencies to continue operating, the rider was attached, and it went through Senator Barbara Mikulski’s Appropriations Committee. And she left this rider in the bill, and we hold her responsible. Now, part of the problem with these large spending bills that have to pass very quickly is there’s a lot of room for this kind of mischief. And these spending bills are a response to the dysfunction in Congress when we can’t have a normal budgeting process.

And what this rider actually does is it prevents the courts from stepping in under our most important environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act, which gives citizens the right to sue: If they believe that the government is about to make a very large and important decision that will have many impacts, they can sue for judicial review. And this rider will prevent that in the case of genetically engineered crops being planted after a court says that there hasn’t been a proper environmental assessment. We’re very concerned about this, because there are a number of crops in the pipeline, like 2,4-D corn, which could actually be impacted by this rider.

Now, because this is a budget bill and the budget bill will run out at the end of this fiscal year, which is September 31st, this bill or this rider will no longer be in effect. However, we should be concerned. Because of the dysfunction in Congress, it’s possible that the spending bill that was just passed could just be reauthorized for the coming months until a new budget could be debated and passed. So, activists are organizing around the country to put pressure on elected officials to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

AARON MATÉ: And, Greg Jaffe, you’re with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Your response to this bill? And does it represent something new here?

GREGORYJAFFE: So, I mean, let me first say that I don’t support this rider in the bill, but I also—I’m surprised. I’m not sure—I don’t see why it was necessary by the people who thought it needed to be put into law, nor do I think that it changes the current powers or legal authority that the USDA already had or the relationship of the courts and the executive branch.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about why you feel that this bill, Gregory Jaffe, or the rider on the bill doesn’t change things.

GREGORYJAFFE: OK, so, you have to go back a few years. And the way that USDA regulates genetically engineered crops is they regulate them under the Plant Protection Act, and they ensure that these plants don’t have any plant pest characteristics or harm agricultural interests. And so they regulate them, and at some point they decide to deregulate them, to decide that they don’t have any of these risks associated with them, and they can be planted freely by farmers. That is a major federal action, and at the same time they need to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, as Wenonah mentioned, and that requires them doing an assessment of the potential environmental impacts of their—of their action. And that’s required by all federal agencies when they do any major action that might impact the environment.

Several of these decisions by USDA have been challenged in court. The genetically engineered alfalfa was challenged in court. The genetic-engineered sugar beets was challenged in court. And in both of those cases, the court said that while USDA didn’t violate the Plant Protection Act, didn’t make a wrong decision regarding whether the genetically engineered crop was a plant pest, they didn’t follow the right procedures, and they didn’t do the proper assessment under the National Environmental Policy Act. And so, the courts, to a large extent, slapped the hand of the—the wrist of the USDA and said, "You have to go back and do that, and until you do that, your decision on the merits on whether the genetically engineered crops harm agriculture needs to be vacated." And so they went back, and they did that. Now, in the case of the sugar beets, while they were doing that environmental assessment, they issued temporary permits, which they are allowed to do, or temporary deregulation, under the current Plant Protection Act. So they figured out a way to allow farmers to grow that crop in—with conditions imposed, so that they wouldn’t impact the environment in any way, so that there wouldn’t be any potential environmental impact while they carried out the National Environmental [Policy] Act’s environmental assessment.

So, I think that’s what this provision says. It says that if a court vacates or turns back a decision by the secretary about a genetically engineered crop, that the secretary can go ahead and issue a temporary permit or partially deregulate that crop, with conditions—the language specifically talks about with conditions—that ensure that there’s no environmental impact, while they go ahead and comply with the court’s order.

AMYGOODMAN: So, Wenonah Hauter—

GREGORYJAFFE: So, to me—

AMYGOODMAN: —what is the problem here, then, if there has been no change?

WENONAHHAUTER: Well, there—one of the changes is that it has delayed these crops getting into the food system. But I don’t think we want to get caught up in the technical details of how these crops are laxly approved. What we have here is Monsanto flexing its political muscle, because it’s not only trying to pass riders like the current one on judicial review, it’s been trying to get riders on these big spending bills or the farm bill that would actually prohibit any review and would be a rubber stamp of these crops. I think we have to look at the enormous amount of power, political power, that Monsanto has, that it can actually get this kind of precedent-changing rider that could have effects in other areas, because we don’t like to see this kind of precedent that really prohibits judicial review.

And I think we have to look at how much money that the biotech industry has spent on lobbying. I mean, over the last 10 years, the biotech industry has spent $272 million on lobbying and campaign contributions. They have a hundred lobby shops in Washington. They’ve hired 13 former members of Congress. They’ve hired 300 former staffers for the White House and for Congress. And Monsanto alone has spent $63 million over the last 12 years on lobbying and campaign contributions. This is about political muscle and forcing their will on the American people. And if we don’t put a stop to it here, we’re going to see many, many more serious violations.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to go to break and come back to this discussion. We’re talking to Wenonah Hauter, who is author of Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America, and Greg Jaffe, who is with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. We’re talking about Monsanto, which is the world’s largest producer of genetically modified seeds. We invited them on; they declined to come on. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: Our guests today are Greg Jaffe—he’s with the Center for Science in the Public Interest—and Wenonah Hauter of Food & Water Watch. Her book is called Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America.

I want to read from Monsanto’s statement regarding what they call the "Farmer Assurance Provision." They said, quote, "The point of the Farmer Assurance Provision is to strike a careful balance allowing farmers to continue to plant and cultivate their crops subject to appropriate environmental safeguards, while USDA conducts any necessary further environmental reviews."

But I want to go to the core of really what you’re both concerned about, and that is the issue of genetically engineered foods. Greg Jaffe, you’re not as concerned as Wenonah Hauter. Talk about what genetically engineered foods are and what your thoughts are on them.

GREGORYJAFFE: So, farmers have been growing genetically engineered crops for about 15 years now in the United States. And those varieties of corn and soybeans and cotton and canola were engineered in the laboratory by scientists, where they add a gene from a different organism that imparts a specific trait, a beneficial trait, into that crop, and then that crop is grown, and then food is made from that crop. So we have some crops that have a built-in pesticide, for example, so that we don’t need to spray a chemical pesticide over the top of those crops. And so, if that’s a genetically engineered corn, that corn might end up in our food in terms of high-fructose corn syrup or cornstarch or corn flakes, and something along those lines.

The evidence to date on the current crops that are grown in the United States is that those are safe to eat. I think there is a strong international consensus about that. And so, you know, at CSPI, we’re comfortable in telling people that if you’re going to be eating food made from those crops that are currently out there, there is not a food safety risk associated with those crops.

That’s different than the regulatory system, and I think maybe that’s at the core of some of this. And I think that the—whether we’re talking about the USDA, the Department of Agriculture or the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency, clearly the U.S. regulatory system and oversight of these crops has not been ideal. And so, at the center, we’ve been working for a number of years to try to improve that regulatory system, to give the agencies the authority to make sure, before these crops get out there, that they are safe to eat and they are safe for the environment. So while we can say they’re safe, current ones, for the future ones, we would like the agencies to take a little closer look at them.

AARON MATÉ: Well, let’s get a response from Wenonah Hauter. Your thoughts on this issue, the argument here being that the science so far shows that it’s safe, but regulation needs to improve?

WENONAHHAUTER: Well, first of all, I would disagree that there’s any international agreement that genetically engineered crops are safe. And, in fact, they’re banned in some countries. And there’s a lot of concern in places like Europe, where we have the precautionary principle, about genetically engineered foods. And there actually is a body of research that shows that genetically engineered soy and corn have health effects. These studies are feeding studies on animals, which is how this research is generally done. They show liver and kidney impairment—there are a number of studies showing this. Rat pups whose mothers ate genetically engineered soy had high mortality rates. And the genetically engineered hormone that’s used to—it’s actually injected into cows so that they produce more milk. Italian research has found that those transgenes actually survive—they survive pasteurization, and they end up in the milk.

So, part of the problem is also that there isn’t enough research. We have a very lax regulatory system. The technology licensing agreements that Monsanto and other companies have for the biotech products that they develop mean that researchers can’t legally get a hold of these seeds or grow the crops to actually do testing. And there’s also not money for the kind of long-term health impact studies that there should be when you’re doing such a major change in our food system. So I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned.

And we’re also talking about the immense control over seeds that, well, one company—I mean, we basically have three companies that dominate seeds in the world. So, if you’re saying that there’s no problem with genetically engineered seeds, you’re very narrowly looking at what the impacts could be on the developing world, even farmers here, where Monsanto regularly investigates 500 farmers, approximately, every year and sues them if they don’t adhere to their contract. Monsanto is very aggressive with farmers. And it’s very clear that this is simply a way to control seeds and profit from them, and from their co-branded chemicals, their herbicides like Roundup Ready, that are applied along with the genetically engineered crops that are sowed in the fields.

AMYGOODMAN: Your response, Greg Jaffe?

GREGORYJAFFE: I’m not here to defend Monsanto or the industry. I would agree that they have practices that may not be the best practices out there. They’re clearly out to make money. There’s no question about that. But I think we have to separate the company from the merit of these individual crops themselves. And so, when I talk about the safety of the crops, I’m talking about a case-by-case basis. I can’t say that the future crops—whether a future crop is going to be safe or not going to be safe. We can only look at what we have today and look at the best scientific evidence out there and say, "Is this genetically engineered corn, this variety that has a built-in pesticide, and is it safe to eat? Is it safe for the environment?" And I do think that the—

AMYGOODMAN: And do you feel it’s been adequately studied and that the corporate influence over the science hasn’t prevented that or contaminated the results?

GREGORYJAFFE: I think that, you know, the Food and Drug Administration, the European Food Safety Agency, the WHO—the World Health Organization—the Royal Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, a lot of these international scientific bodies have taken a look, as independent scientists, at not just the information that Monsanto or the biotech developer has provided, but all of the research out there. And I think that—in fact, I think the European Food Safety Agency spent millions of dollars giving independent researchers to do risk assessment work around these genetically engineered crops. And to date, the consensus has been—again, for the current crops that are out there—that those crops are safe to eat and that they have some environmental benefits and that any environmental risks that they have can be mitigated—keeping in mind, obviously, that the agriculture has a huge environmental footprint.

AMYGOODMAN: Do you feel the science is as established as Greg Jaffe is saying, Wenonah Hauter?

WENONAHHAUTER: No, I don’t think that the science is as established. And I think you have to look at the enormous power that these companies have on our regulatory agencies here and increasingly in Europe. We at Food & Water Watch have a Brussels office, and one of our main jobs there is trying to document the footprint that our U.S. biotech industry is having in Europe, trying to influence their Food Safety Agency and the different governments that—some of which have bans on genetically engineered food.

I think that this is a political issue. This is not about the safety of these crops, because there really has never been long-term research on what the impact is, both on the diet and on the environment. And I’m concerned when I see that the immense amount of money that Monsanto and other companies are spending on trying to greenwash themselves, when they are able to persuade well-meaning advocates that they’ve done a good job.

I mean, I think we have to look at Monsanto. They have spent, just over a two-year period, $279 million on advertising, talking about how they want to feed the world and that they’re really doing this for the benefit of humankind, not to make money. But when you look at what they’re actually doing, they are making an enormous profit on seeds. Seeds are becoming increasingly expensive. And there are a lot of broader issues besides the few health impact and environment studies that have been done. I mean, we have to look at this in the broadest context of what it means to give one, two, three companies this much control over how seeds are sold and produced and food is produced.

AARON MATÉ: Let’s talk about the movement to label products containing the ingredients made by these companies. While on the campaign trail in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to label GMO foods, if elected.

SEN. BARACKOBAMA: Here’s what I’ll do as president. I’ll immediately implement country-of-origin labeling, because Americans should know where their food comes from. We’ll let folks know whether their food has been genetically modified, because Americans should know what they’re buying.

AARON MATÉ: That’s President Obama speaking in 2007, before he was elected president. Greg Jaffe, do you support the labeling of GMO foods?

GREGORYJAFFE: We support the fact that consumers should have the right to know and should be able to get information about their foods, whether their foods are genetically engineered, whether their foods came from plants that were irradiated or were produced through chemical mutagenesis. So, we do think consumers who want to know about how their foods were produced and where they came from should have a right to do that.

We aren’t supportive of a mandatory label—putting on mandatory label, at this point, on whether a food was genetically engineered or not. And that is in part because we don’t want information out there that’s misleading to the consumer, and also because we want to ensure that the most important information—mandatory labeling is left for the most important information, so information that directly impacts food safety or the health of consumers and nutrition of consumers, keeping in mind, again, that the current genetically engineered crops, the way that most consumers eat those foods, is in highly processed ingredients. So, we eat corn as high-fructose corn syrup or corn oil. And when we produce high-fructose corn syrup or corn oil or sugar from sugar—genetically engineered sugar beets, we eliminate all of the genetically engineered elements. We eliminate the DNA. We eliminate the protein that was produced by that DNA that had been engineered into the plant. And so, biologically and chemically, whether you have two—if you have two jars of corn oil, one from genetically engineered crops and one from non-genetically engineered crops side by side, they are biologically and chemically identical. And so, that is—

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s—

GREGORYJAFFE: That comes into this calculus.

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s get Wenonah Hauter’s response to this issue of food labeling. Wenonah?

WENONAHHAUTER: Well, consumers want, and should have the right, to know if their food is genetically engineered. And while many of the crops that have been genetically engineered do go into processed food, today we’re seeing the foods that end up on your plate being either already genetically engineered or in the pipeline for approval. I’m talking about the GE sweet corn that was approved last year. There has been a multi-year battle over GE salmon. And while we hope the FDA does not approve it, and there has been a huge outpouring of support for not approving it, we’re concerned that if they move ahead, it will not be labeled.

One of the health effects that we do know happens from eating genetically engineered products is an allergy to protein. So, for the genetically engineered salmon, there could be very serious allergic reactions that could occur, and the food should be labeled. And people believe that they have a right to know what’s in their food. So I think that voluntary labeling is not enough. And, in fact, what’s exciting is there is a backlash against the biotech industry. There are campaigns in more than 30 states fighting to get labeling for genetically engineered food. So, even though the biotech industry has spent a boatload of money to stop it, there is a movement growing, and I believe that we will see genetically engineered food labeled in the—

AMYGOODMAN: Wenonah Hauter, just before—

WENONAHHAUTER: —in the near future.

AMYGOODMAN: I know Greg Jaffe has to leave, and I want him to weigh in on genetically engineered salmon. Greg?

GREGORYJAFFE: So, first, I might make a statement that I think, you know, the most important thing, if there’s any question about whether a food is an allergen or potential allergen because it was genetically engineered, our view is that that should not be allowed on the market. We shouldn’t use labeling as a surrogate for safety. We shouldn’t allow a food that is an allergen, that has a new allergen, onto the food supply and label it and let people choose. If there’s any food safety risk in that food, it shouldn’t be allowed, which is why we at CSPI advocate for a mandatory premarket approval process of these genetically engineered crops and analysis beforehand, because if there’s any question of safety, they shouldn’t go on the market. We don’t believe we should allow them on the market but, because they’re an allergen, label them and let people choose. So, I just wanted to clarify that.

The genetically engineered salmon, I think that—I think there’s been a lot of misunderstanding out there about this genetically engineered salmon that’s in front of FDA for approval. In my mind, it’s really just a proof of concept application. The company has requested that this salmon be grown in one facility in Panama for inland tanks, and it’s only going to produce a small amount of this salmon. Less than 1 percent of the salmon that we would import would be this genetically engineered salmon. So, although I’m still waiting to see whether FDA does approve that and whether it’s safe to eat and safe for the environment, assuming that they do that, I think that it’s going to be a long time before we might see this as a dominant part of the salmon market.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to break, and then we’re going to continue with Wenonah Hauter on her new book, Foodopoly. Greg Jaffe, I want to thank you so much for being with us, director of the Biotechnology Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and also Wenonah Hauter with Food & Water Watch. We’ll come back with Wenonah in a minute.

GREGORYJAFFE: Thank you very much.

]]>
Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America from Monsanto to Wal-Marthttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/2/foodopoly_the_battle_over_the_future
tag:democracynow.org,2013-04-02:en/story/491624 AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s go back to Senator Jon Tester of Montana. It&#8217;s unusual that a family farmer is a senator these days, but that&#8217;s just what Senator Tester is. In March, he tried to block the rider decried by critics as the &quot;Monsanto Protection Act.&quot; He spoke from the Senate floor.
SEN . JON TESTER : Mr. President, Montana is home to thousands of working families that make a living off the land. Like my wife and I, they&#8217;re family farmers and ranchers. The House of Representatives is prepared to toss those working families aside in favor of the nation&#8217;s large meatpacking corporations.
The House inserted a provision in the bill that gives enormous marketing power to America&#8217;s three largest meatpacking corporations, while stiffing family farmers and ranchers. Family-run production agriculture faces tremendous market manipulation. Chicken farmers, hog farmers, cattle ranchers all struggle to get a fair price from the meatpackers, and if they fight back, they risk angering corporate representatives and being shut out of the market. Thanks to this provision, the Agricultural Department will not be able to ensure a fair, open market that put the brakes on the worst abuses by the meatpacking industry. What&#8217;s worse is that the USDA took congressionally mandated steps to protect ranchers from market manipulation over the last few years. That&#8217;s what we told them to do in the 2008 farm bill. And this provision will actually overturn rules that the USDA has already put into place. But apparently, intense, behind-the-scenes lobbying won out in the House of Representatives, and now we&#8217;re back to square one with the big meatpackers calling the shots.
The second provision sent over from the House tells the USDA to ignore any judicial ruling regarding the planting of genetically modified crops. Its supporters are calling it &quot;Farmer Assurance Provision.&quot; But all it really assures is a lack of corporate liability. The provision says that when a judge finds that the USDA approved a crop illegally, the department must re-approve the crop and allow it to continue to be planted, regardless of what the judge says. Now let&#8217;s think about that. The United States Congress is telling the Agricultural Department that even if a court tells you that you&#8217;ve failed to follow the right process and tells you to start over, you must disregard the court&#8217;s ruling and allow the crop to be planted anyway. Not only does this ignore the constitutional idea of separation of powers, but it also lets genetically modified crops take hold across this country, even when a judge finds it violates the law—once again, agribusiness multinational corporations putting farmers as serfs. It&#8217;s a dangerous precedent. Mr. President, it will paralyze the USDA , putting the department in the middle of a battle between Congress and the courts. And the ultimate loser will be our family farmers going about their business and feeding America in the right way.
Sunshine Week shouldn&#8217;t be a show-and-tell, Mr. President. And slipping corporate giveaways into a bill at the same time that we call for more open government is doubling down on the same policies that created the need for Sunshine Week in the first place. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;ve introduced two amendments to remove these corporate welfare provisions from the bill. Montana has elected me to go to the Senate to do away with the shady backroom deals, to get rid of handouts to big corporations and to make government work better.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s Montana senator, a Democrat, Jon Tester. He&#8217;s a family farmer, lost several of his fingers in a meat-grinding accident when he was nine years old. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . Aaron?
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, and we&#8217;re still with Wenonah Hauter in Washington, the executive director of Food &amp; Water Watch. Wenonah, you&#8217;ve come out with a book called Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America . We&#8217;re going to turn to that in a second, but first, your group is just putting out a report called &quot;Monsanto: A Corporate Profile.&quot; Lay out for us your findings.
WENONAH HAUTER : Well, our findings are that Monsanto has so much power over the political process that it&#8217;s basically buying public policy. That&#8217;s why we&#8217;ve seen this terrible rider recently. It&#8217;s why we have such a lax process for approving genetically engineered crops. And it goes back all the way to the 1980s, when these crops were being developed, and Monsanto went into the Reagan administration and said, &quot;You know, we&#8217;ve been involved in a lot of litigation.&quot; Because Monsanto had been a producer of some of the most dangerous chemicals—PCBs, dioxin—they were involved in hundreds of lawsuits. So, they didn&#8217;t want a new law that would actually be a real review process for genetically engineered crops. They wanted to have a very lax set of bureaucratic hoops that they knew they could jump through and that their young startup competitors would not be able to jump through. And that&#8217;s how we&#8217;ve ended up with this mishmash of different agencies involved in approving genetically engineered crops.
It&#8217;s why we don&#8217;t really have a regulatory system that is doing the research that&#8217;s looking at the long-term impacts that these crops have, not just in terms of health and safety, but the economic impacts because of the increasing price of seeds, the increasing use of the co-branded herbicides. Roundup Ready has doubled in use in the last few years. Now we&#8217;re seeing new genetically engineered seeds created that have even more dangerous chemicals that are co-branded with them. And so, we&#8217;re really on a downward spiral with these types of crops. And genetically engineered crops are the underpinning of our dysfunctional food system. As Greg mentioned, they are the components of processed food.
AMY GOODMAN : And how this issue—talk about the corporate farmer versus the family farmer, like your family in northern Virginia.
WENONAH HAUTER : Well, you know, what&#8217;s happened over the past several decades is that it&#8217;s become increasingly impossible for farmers to make a living. And I mean even midsize and small commodity farmers. We have fewer than a million family farmers left. And if you look at what a midsize family farmer—and I&#8217;m talking about commodities—corn, wheat and soy—they make, on average, $19.2 thousand. And shockingly, half of that is from a government payment.
Now, there is a movement for community-supported agriculture. You know, I&#8217;m lucky. I grew up on a farm. I inherited my family&#8217;s farm. But my farm is 45 miles west of Washington, D.C., where there&#8217;s a huge market for foods that are grown with organic practices, where people want to bring their children out to see a farm. Now that&#8217;s very different from the vast majority of farms in this country. Only one-third of the farms in this country are anywhere near a metropolitan area. We need to shape a food system that allows farmers to make a living and transition into a sustainable farming future. And we can&#8217;t do that with the current rules in place. And I think that really that&#8217;s why I wrote Foodopoly , to lay out why we need to look at the bigger structural issues that are causing our dysfunctional food system. And I&#8217;m talking about the consolidation and concentration of power in the hands of just a few companies, and companies beyond Monsanto.
AARON MATÉ: Well, one of those companies is Wal-Mart. And you have a chapter called &quot;Walmarting the Food Chain.&quot; Can you talk about this?
WENONAH HAUTER : Well, over the past few years, since the—well, it&#8217;s the past few decades, since the Reagan administration eviscerated antitrust law. Those are the rules that prevented companies from getting too big, from buying their competitors, from concentrating power in the hands of a just—just a few companies. Since that time, we&#8217;ve seen the grocery industry consolidate. We now have four grocery stores that control 50 percent of sales, and in many areas 70 to 90 percent of sales. Wal-Mart is the very largest. One out of three grocery dollars is spent at Wal-Mart. And if you look at the economic impact, the Wal-Mart heirs have as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans.
And what Wal-Mart has figured out, how they operate, is that they have a logistical system that sucks all of the profit out of the food chain. So, one thing is that they need enormous volume. So, they would much rather deal with a giant meatpacker like Tyson than a lot of smaller family farms or even midsize farms. They have a system where they force their suppliers to use their IT system, to track their own inventory, to use all of the contracting requirements that they put into writing. In fact, there are no contract negotiations with Wal-Mart. And so, even the largest food processors in this country have to do whatever Wal-Mart says.
And we have 20 food-processing companies that do control most of what Americans eat. So, you know, there&#8217;s all this rhetoric about competition and that our economic system is built on competition, but what we&#8217;ve actually seen, especially since the 1980s, is that all of the rules and regulations are geared at allowing enormous consolidation. And so, for the food industry, beyond Wal-Mart and the grocery retailers, we have the big food-processing companies. So when a consumer goes into the grocery store, they believe that there&#8217;s a lot of diversity and choice, but actually we have 20 food-processing companies that own most of the brands in the grocery store. And unfortunately, 14 of these large food processors also own many of the largest organic brands.
So this kind of concentration is making it very difficult for consumers to have real choices about what they eat. And it&#8217;s squeezing all of the profit out of actually producing food, even producing corn and soy. A conventional farmer makes about three to five cents off of a giant box of corn flakes, about three—two to three cents on a giant bag of corn chips, and under a penny on the high-fructose corn syrup in a can of soda.
AMY GOODMAN : Wenonah Hauter, we have less than a minute. Tomorrow your organization Food &amp; Water Watch is putting out &quot;Monsanto: A Corporate Profile.&quot; And your book is called Foodopoly . What most surprised you in your years of research over the battle over the future of food and farming in America?
WENONAH HAUTER : I think it&#8217;s the inability of farmers to really change what they grow because of their investment in their equipment, because of the lack of a fair marketplace, because of the adverse weather in large parts of this country, where it&#8217;s difficult to compete with California. And I think it&#8217;s also the impact of the so-called &quot;free trade&quot; agreements on our food system and the offshoring of food production and the impact that&#8217;s had on consumers and on farming in this country.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to thank you very much for being with us, Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food &amp; Water Watch. Her recent book, Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America . We will link to your new report that&#8217;s coming out tomorrow, &quot;Monsanto: A Corporate Profile.&quot; AMYGOODMAN: Let’s go back to Senator Jon Tester of Montana. It’s unusual that a family farmer is a senator these days, but that’s just what Senator Tester is. In March, he tried to block the rider decried by critics as the "Monsanto Protection Act." He spoke from the Senate floor.

SEN. JONTESTER: Mr. President, Montana is home to thousands of working families that make a living off the land. Like my wife and I, they’re family farmers and ranchers. The House of Representatives is prepared to toss those working families aside in favor of the nation’s large meatpacking corporations.

The House inserted a provision in the bill that gives enormous marketing power to America’s three largest meatpacking corporations, while stiffing family farmers and ranchers. Family-run production agriculture faces tremendous market manipulation. Chicken farmers, hog farmers, cattle ranchers all struggle to get a fair price from the meatpackers, and if they fight back, they risk angering corporate representatives and being shut out of the market. Thanks to this provision, the Agricultural Department will not be able to ensure a fair, open market that put the brakes on the worst abuses by the meatpacking industry. What’s worse is that the USDA took congressionally mandated steps to protect ranchers from market manipulation over the last few years. That’s what we told them to do in the 2008 farm bill. And this provision will actually overturn rules that the USDA has already put into place. But apparently, intense, behind-the-scenes lobbying won out in the House of Representatives, and now we’re back to square one with the big meatpackers calling the shots.

The second provision sent over from the House tells the USDA to ignore any judicial ruling regarding the planting of genetically modified crops. Its supporters are calling it "Farmer Assurance Provision." But all it really assures is a lack of corporate liability. The provision says that when a judge finds that the USDA approved a crop illegally, the department must re-approve the crop and allow it to continue to be planted, regardless of what the judge says. Now let’s think about that. The United States Congress is telling the Agricultural Department that even if a court tells you that you’ve failed to follow the right process and tells you to start over, you must disregard the court’s ruling and allow the crop to be planted anyway. Not only does this ignore the constitutional idea of separation of powers, but it also lets genetically modified crops take hold across this country, even when a judge finds it violates the law—once again, agribusiness multinational corporations putting farmers as serfs. It’s a dangerous precedent. Mr. President, it will paralyze the USDA, putting the department in the middle of a battle between Congress and the courts. And the ultimate loser will be our family farmers going about their business and feeding America in the right way.

Sunshine Week shouldn’t be a show-and-tell, Mr. President. And slipping corporate giveaways into a bill at the same time that we call for more open government is doubling down on the same policies that created the need for Sunshine Week in the first place. That’s why I’ve introduced two amendments to remove these corporate welfare provisions from the bill. Montana has elected me to go to the Senate to do away with the shady backroom deals, to get rid of handouts to big corporations and to make government work better.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s Montana senator, a Democrat, Jon Tester. He’s a family farmer, lost several of his fingers in a meat-grinding accident when he was nine years old. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Aaron?

AARON MATÉ: Yeah, and we’re still with Wenonah Hauter in Washington, the executive director of Food & Water Watch. Wenonah, you’ve come out with a book called Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America. We’re going to turn to that in a second, but first, your group is just putting out a report called "Monsanto: A Corporate Profile." Lay out for us your findings.

WENONAHHAUTER: Well, our findings are that Monsanto has so much power over the political process that it’s basically buying public policy. That’s why we’ve seen this terrible rider recently. It’s why we have such a lax process for approving genetically engineered crops. And it goes back all the way to the 1980s, when these crops were being developed, and Monsanto went into the Reagan administration and said, "You know, we’ve been involved in a lot of litigation." Because Monsanto had been a producer of some of the most dangerous chemicals—PCBs, dioxin—they were involved in hundreds of lawsuits. So, they didn’t want a new law that would actually be a real review process for genetically engineered crops. They wanted to have a very lax set of bureaucratic hoops that they knew they could jump through and that their young startup competitors would not be able to jump through. And that’s how we’ve ended up with this mishmash of different agencies involved in approving genetically engineered crops.

It’s why we don’t really have a regulatory system that is doing the research that’s looking at the long-term impacts that these crops have, not just in terms of health and safety, but the economic impacts because of the increasing price of seeds, the increasing use of the co-branded herbicides. Roundup Ready has doubled in use in the last few years. Now we’re seeing new genetically engineered seeds created that have even more dangerous chemicals that are co-branded with them. And so, we’re really on a downward spiral with these types of crops. And genetically engineered crops are the underpinning of our dysfunctional food system. As Greg mentioned, they are the components of processed food.

AMYGOODMAN: And how this issue—talk about the corporate farmer versus the family farmer, like your family in northern Virginia.

WENONAHHAUTER: Well, you know, what’s happened over the past several decades is that it’s become increasingly impossible for farmers to make a living. And I mean even midsize and small commodity farmers. We have fewer than a million family farmers left. And if you look at what a midsize family farmer—and I’m talking about commodities—corn, wheat and soy—they make, on average, $19.2 thousand. And shockingly, half of that is from a government payment.

Now, there is a movement for community-supported agriculture. You know, I’m lucky. I grew up on a farm. I inherited my family’s farm. But my farm is 45 miles west of Washington, D.C., where there’s a huge market for foods that are grown with organic practices, where people want to bring their children out to see a farm. Now that’s very different from the vast majority of farms in this country. Only one-third of the farms in this country are anywhere near a metropolitan area. We need to shape a food system that allows farmers to make a living and transition into a sustainable farming future. And we can’t do that with the current rules in place. And I think that really that’s why I wrote Foodopoly, to lay out why we need to look at the bigger structural issues that are causing our dysfunctional food system. And I’m talking about the consolidation and concentration of power in the hands of just a few companies, and companies beyond Monsanto.

AARON MATÉ: Well, one of those companies is Wal-Mart. And you have a chapter called "Walmarting the Food Chain." Can you talk about this?

WENONAHHAUTER: Well, over the past few years, since the—well, it’s the past few decades, since the Reagan administration eviscerated antitrust law. Those are the rules that prevented companies from getting too big, from buying their competitors, from concentrating power in the hands of a just—just a few companies. Since that time, we’ve seen the grocery industry consolidate. We now have four grocery stores that control 50 percent of sales, and in many areas 70 to 90 percent of sales. Wal-Mart is the very largest. One out of three grocery dollars is spent at Wal-Mart. And if you look at the economic impact, the Wal-Mart heirs have as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans.

And what Wal-Mart has figured out, how they operate, is that they have a logistical system that sucks all of the profit out of the food chain. So, one thing is that they need enormous volume. So, they would much rather deal with a giant meatpacker like Tyson than a lot of smaller family farms or even midsize farms. They have a system where they force their suppliers to use their IT system, to track their own inventory, to use all of the contracting requirements that they put into writing. In fact, there are no contract negotiations with Wal-Mart. And so, even the largest food processors in this country have to do whatever Wal-Mart says.

And we have 20 food-processing companies that do control most of what Americans eat. So, you know, there’s all this rhetoric about competition and that our economic system is built on competition, but what we’ve actually seen, especially since the 1980s, is that all of the rules and regulations are geared at allowing enormous consolidation. And so, for the food industry, beyond Wal-Mart and the grocery retailers, we have the big food-processing companies. So when a consumer goes into the grocery store, they believe that there’s a lot of diversity and choice, but actually we have 20 food-processing companies that own most of the brands in the grocery store. And unfortunately, 14 of these large food processors also own many of the largest organic brands.

So this kind of concentration is making it very difficult for consumers to have real choices about what they eat. And it’s squeezing all of the profit out of actually producing food, even producing corn and soy. A conventional farmer makes about three to five cents off of a giant box of corn flakes, about three—two to three cents on a giant bag of corn chips, and under a penny on the high-fructose corn syrup in a can of soda.

AMYGOODMAN: Wenonah Hauter, we have less than a minute. Tomorrow your organization Food & Water Watch is putting out "Monsanto: A Corporate Profile." And your book is called Foodopoly. What most surprised you in your years of research over the battle over the future of food and farming in America?

WENONAHHAUTER: I think it’s the inability of farmers to really change what they grow because of their investment in their equipment, because of the lack of a fair marketplace, because of the adverse weather in large parts of this country, where it’s difficult to compete with California. And I think it’s also the impact of the so-called "free trade" agreements on our food system and the offshoring of food production and the impact that’s had on consumers and on farming in this country.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. Her recent book, Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America. We will link to your new report that’s coming out tomorrow, "Monsanto: A Corporate Profile."

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Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400Part 2: "Pandora's Lunchbox" and the Truth About Soy Protein in Processed Foodhttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/3/15/part_2_pandoras_lunchbox_and_the_truth_about_soy_protein_in_processed_food
tag:democracynow.org,2013-03-15:blog/544a5e Watch part two of our interview with with author Melanie Warner, longtime food reporter and author of the newly published book, Pandora&#8217;s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal . In our extended conversation, she examines a very common ingredient in processed food: soy protein.
Click here to see part one of this interview with Warner, when she describes how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive and most nutritionally inferior food in the world.
See all of Democracy Now! &#8217;s coverage of food issues.
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. Melanie Warner is joining us, longtime journalist covering the food industry. Her new book is called Pandora&#8217;s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal . Melanie, can you talk about soy products?
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, I think soy is one of the more confusing products out there for people. I mean, there—and the problem is, there&#8217;s soy, and there&#8217;s soy. So you have traditional soy products that have been consumed in Asia for centuries, and these are things like miso and tempeh. These are fermented soy products that are actually quite healthy. Tempeh, for instance, has beneficial bacteria in it, much like yogurt does. People don&#8217;t always realize that. And then you have—
AMY GOODMAN : I&#8217;m a great devotee of tempeh. I love tempeh.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, and it&#8217;s actually quite delicious, more so than tofu. And so—
AMY GOODMAN : I agree.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah. And then you have—and then you have the other kind of soy products, which is these highly processed soy products, which are very predominant ingredients in processed food.
So, for instance, soybean oil. Soybean oil has been the leading fat that&#8217;s been in processed food for the past five or six decades. It&#8217;s so prevalent that it consumes—my estimation was that it—we&#8217;re consuming 10 percent of our total daily calories from soybean oil, in part because it&#8217;s in—used to fry a lot of foods. So, soybean oil is something that when you go to the grocery store, I&#8217;ve seen—I&#8217;ve seen it listed on chip packages as a simple, natural ingredient. And if you look at bottles of cooking oil over in a different aisle, it&#8217;ll say &quot;100 percent natural.&quot; But I spent a fair amount of time learning about how soybean oil is produced, and when you find out about it, you realize it doesn&#8217;t scream &quot;natural&quot; at all. The main process uses a chemical called hexane, which is known to be a neurotoxic chemical. And they use that to leech the oil out of the soybeans. It&#8217;s very efficient at doing that. And then they vacuum it off. So the idea is that no hexane remains in the final oil, or if any does, it&#8217;s small amounts. And then soybean oil goes through other processes, like bleaching and deodorizing. And this has the effect of removing some of the healthy things that would otherwise be in soybean oil, like vitamin E and compounds called phytosterols. So—and then sometimes there&#8217;s more processes, like hydrogenation, this relatively new process called interesterification. So this is a very processed processed oil that we&#8217;re consuming.
And then you could look at something like soy protein, which comes after the soybean oil production. And that is also something that, by the time it gets to be soy protein—I spent some time inside a soy protein manufacturing plant; this one was outside of—outside of Memphis—and saw these giant hissing and whirling machines and all these chemicals that go into the process in the making of this, that by the time it gets—and there are so many steps—that by the time you get to soy protein, you have almost no nutrition there. Soybeans are this tidy package of vitamins and minerals and fiber and phytosterols, and by the time you get to soy protein, really all you have left is protein, and everything else has been processed out.
AMY GOODMAN : So, how do you look for what&#8217;s good or bad when you&#8217;re buying food, in terms of the ingredient list? And let me go to a subject that might surprise people: Subway. You know, it&#8217;s being touted as the great both, yes, chain, but healthy alternative, because the bread is baked, you know, in the store, and there are a lot of vegetables that are included. I was shocked, on page 11 of &quot;Weird Science,&quot; where you talk about the number of ingredients of a Subway sweet onion chicken teriyaki sandwich. And for folks who like little quizzes, guess how many ingredients there are in a Subway sweet onion chicken teriyaki sandwich. The answer would be 105. Fifty-five are dry, dusty substances that were added to the sandwich for a whole variety of reasons. I&#8217;m going to try to read some of these. &quot;The chicken contains thirteen: potassium chloride, maltodextrin, autolyzed yeast extract, gum Arabic, salt, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, fructose, dextrose, thiamine hydrochloride, soy protein concentrate, modified potato starch, sodium phosphates. The teriyaki glaze has twelve: sodium benzoate, modified food starch, salt, sugar, acetic acid, maltodextrin, corn starch, spice, wheat, natural flavoring, garlic powder, yeast extract. The fat-free sweet onion sauce, you get another eight.&quot; And it goes on from there. I don&#8217;t have any of these ingredients in my cupboards, Melanie.
MELANIE WARNER : Amy, you did a great job pronouncing all that. I&#8217;m very impressed. I think it&#8217;s very important—I spent a lot of time looking at ingredient lists, and I think it&#8217;s very important to look at what goes into your food. It&#8217;s important to look at the amount of sugar and sodium in your food, but also look at the ingredients and see what&#8217;s in there. And if there are a zillion ingredients, 30 ingredients for a given product, that is a highly processed product. And if there are things that you don&#8217;t recognize, that&#8217;s something that you might—you might want to think about looking in the grocery store for things that have a lot more simple, simple ingredient lists. And think about, is this something—is this a real food, or is this a highly processed product that has a dubious relationship to something natural that once grew on a farm? And I think you can do that by using common sense and also by looking at the ingredient list and thinking, &quot;Is this something that I could actually—that I could actually make at home?&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : What about Gatorade?
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, Gatorade was the subject of a recent controversy, where a teenager in Alabama discovered that there was an ingredient called brominated vegetable oil in her Gatorade. And she was—she was surprised to learn this because bromine, which is used to make brominated vegetable oil, is a flame retardant. So she circulated a petition, and as some petitions do nowadays, it became widely, wildly popular. And the result was that Gatorade removed brominated vegetable oil from their product, which was kind of amazing, to respond to a 15-year-old girl in Alabama, that she had this effect. So, Gatorade—I guess we can think of Gatorade as being slightly healthier. But still, it has an enormous amount of sugar, and it&#8217;s basically sugar water. And it&#8217;s unfortunate that Gatorade is often marketed to kids who are involved in sports activities, and people are convinced somehow that our kids need Gatorade after an hour soccer game instead of—instead of water, which is always the best way to rehydrate. I mean, you drink Gatorade, and you&#8217;re getting quite a lot of sugar.
AMY GOODMAN : I mean, this is amazing, a 15-year-old girl, this ingredient banned in other countries.
MELANIE WARNER : Banned in other countries. And it&#8217;s kind of a surprising ingredient, because it was—it was a subject of a number of concerning studies in the &#39;70s. And the FDA looked at these back then and decided that, OK, we&#39;ll let this ingredient be on the market, but conditionally: only pending further studies to make sure that things are really OK. And those studies have really never been done. And it&#8217;s just one—it&#8217;s one illustration of the way that there&#8217;s a lot of ingredients that—there&#8217;s actually 5,000 additives that are allowed to be added to food in the United States. And there&#8217;s—it&#8217;s just one example of how there are a number of those ingredients that really slip through the cracks and are really not being subjected to a close, scrutinizing eye by the government, specifically the FDA , that people—that people might assume and that we might like them to be doing.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go back to a few things. One is that Pepsi-Cola owns Gatorade. And then just what Sarah Kavanagh, this 15-year-old smarty pants—she&#8217;s remarkably smart—wrote. She said, &quot;The other day I Googled &#39;brominated vegetable oil.&#39; It was the last time I drank Orange Gatorade. I found out that this &#39; BVO &#39; is a controversial flame retardant chemical that is in some Gatorade drinks! Who wants to drink that? Not me!&quot; And, you know, she got this mega-multinational corporation to cave, saying they&#8217;re going to replace it with a substitute. But what&#8217;s the substitute, Melanie?
MELANIE WARNER : Oh, gosh, you know, I forget. It&#8217;s something—I&#8217;ve been meaning to look it up. It&#8217;s something—it&#8217;s another highly processed chemical that I had never heard of. And yeah, it&#8217;s worth looking—
AMY GOODMAN : I&#8217;m sure Sarah will be on it.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, it&#8217;s worth looking into that. But the point is—and the thing that Sarah discovered—is that it&#8217;s not used in other countries, specifically in Europe, and the companies find alternatives in other countries. The same is true of food dyes. It&#8217;s considered—food dyes, like Red 40 and Blue 1, you see on ingredient lists. They are considered to be linked to hyperactivity in children in Europe. And so, if you go to Europe, you see products that have warning labels on them indicating this. And actually, the food companies—there are not very many products in Europe that actually contain these ingredients, because food companies don&#8217;t want to put that kind of a warning label on their products. So they&#8217;re able to—they find alternatives. They use more natural food colorings.
AMY GOODMAN : Melanie, talk about extrusion machines.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, extrusion machines. This is—these are one of the—the type of machinery that the food industry uses that nobody has in their home kitchen. The closest thing you could compare it to is maybe a homemade pasta maker, but that&#8217;s a very far cry. These are highly efficient machines. They are—they have steel, really heavy screws inside them that turn, create enormous amount of pressure and what food scientists call &quot;shear.&quot; And they&#8217;re very effective. You can put a whole bunch of ingredients into one side of an extruder, and it pops out, or extrudes, on the other side. There&#8217;s a die. You can have it in any kind of shape you want. You could have it for—shape of a—letters of the alphabet, like for alphabet cereal, or honeycombs. Or you could have it for Chicken McNuggets. And out on the other side pops a pretty much fully formed product. And one of the unfortunate thing about extruders is that they&#8217;re very good at efficiently making products—you can zip things in and out of there in a minute—but they are fairly damaging to nutrition, particularly certain vitamins and also sometimes—sometimes fiber.
Watch part two of our interview with with author Melanie Warner, longtime food reporter and author of the newly published book, Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal. In our extended conversation, she examines a very common ingredient in processed food: soy protein.

AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Melanie Warner is joining us, longtime journalist covering the food industry. Her new book is called Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal. Melanie, can you talk about soy products?

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah, I think soy is one of the more confusing products out there for people. I mean, there—and the problem is, there’s soy, and there’s soy. So you have traditional soy products that have been consumed in Asia for centuries, and these are things like miso and tempeh. These are fermented soy products that are actually quite healthy. Tempeh, for instance, has beneficial bacteria in it, much like yogurt does. People don’t always realize that. And then you have—

AMYGOODMAN: I’m a great devotee of tempeh. I love tempeh.

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah, and it’s actually quite delicious, more so than tofu. And so—

AMYGOODMAN: I agree.

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah. And then you have—and then you have the other kind of soy products, which is these highly processed soy products, which are very predominant ingredients in processed food.

So, for instance, soybean oil. Soybean oil has been the leading fat that’s been in processed food for the past five or six decades. It’s so prevalent that it consumes—my estimation was that it—we’re consuming 10 percent of our total daily calories from soybean oil, in part because it’s in—used to fry a lot of foods. So, soybean oil is something that when you go to the grocery store, I’ve seen—I’ve seen it listed on chip packages as a simple, natural ingredient. And if you look at bottles of cooking oil over in a different aisle, it’ll say "100 percent natural." But I spent a fair amount of time learning about how soybean oil is produced, and when you find out about it, you realize it doesn’t scream "natural" at all. The main process uses a chemical called hexane, which is known to be a neurotoxic chemical. And they use that to leech the oil out of the soybeans. It’s very efficient at doing that. And then they vacuum it off. So the idea is that no hexane remains in the final oil, or if any does, it’s small amounts. And then soybean oil goes through other processes, like bleaching and deodorizing. And this has the effect of removing some of the healthy things that would otherwise be in soybean oil, like vitamin E and compounds called phytosterols. So—and then sometimes there’s more processes, like hydrogenation, this relatively new process called interesterification. So this is a very processed processed oil that we’re consuming.

And then you could look at something like soy protein, which comes after the soybean oil production. And that is also something that, by the time it gets to be soy protein—I spent some time inside a soy protein manufacturing plant; this one was outside of—outside of Memphis—and saw these giant hissing and whirling machines and all these chemicals that go into the process in the making of this, that by the time it gets—and there are so many steps—that by the time you get to soy protein, you have almost no nutrition there. Soybeans are this tidy package of vitamins and minerals and fiber and phytosterols, and by the time you get to soy protein, really all you have left is protein, and everything else has been processed out.

AMYGOODMAN: So, how do you look for what’s good or bad when you’re buying food, in terms of the ingredient list? And let me go to a subject that might surprise people: Subway. You know, it’s being touted as the great both, yes, chain, but healthy alternative, because the bread is baked, you know, in the store, and there are a lot of vegetables that are included. I was shocked, on page 11 of "Weird Science," where you talk about the number of ingredients of a Subway sweet onion chicken teriyaki sandwich. And for folks who like little quizzes, guess how many ingredients there are in a Subway sweet onion chicken teriyaki sandwich. The answer would be 105. Fifty-five are dry, dusty substances that were added to the sandwich for a whole variety of reasons. I’m going to try to read some of these. "The chicken contains thirteen: potassium chloride, maltodextrin, autolyzed yeast extract, gum Arabic, salt, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, fructose, dextrose, thiamine hydrochloride, soy protein concentrate, modified potato starch, sodium phosphates. The teriyaki glaze has twelve: sodium benzoate, modified food starch, salt, sugar, acetic acid, maltodextrin, corn starch, spice, wheat, natural flavoring, garlic powder, yeast extract. The fat-free sweet onion sauce, you get another eight." And it goes on from there. I don’t have any of these ingredients in my cupboards, Melanie.

MELANIEWARNER: Amy, you did a great job pronouncing all that. I’m very impressed. I think it’s very important—I spent a lot of time looking at ingredient lists, and I think it’s very important to look at what goes into your food. It’s important to look at the amount of sugar and sodium in your food, but also look at the ingredients and see what’s in there. And if there are a zillion ingredients, 30 ingredients for a given product, that is a highly processed product. And if there are things that you don’t recognize, that’s something that you might—you might want to think about looking in the grocery store for things that have a lot more simple, simple ingredient lists. And think about, is this something—is this a real food, or is this a highly processed product that has a dubious relationship to something natural that once grew on a farm? And I think you can do that by using common sense and also by looking at the ingredient list and thinking, "Is this something that I could actually—that I could actually make at home?"

AMYGOODMAN: What about Gatorade?

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah, Gatorade was the subject of a recent controversy, where a teenager in Alabama discovered that there was an ingredient called brominated vegetable oil in her Gatorade. And she was—she was surprised to learn this because bromine, which is used to make brominated vegetable oil, is a flame retardant. So she circulated a petition, and as some petitions do nowadays, it became widely, wildly popular. And the result was that Gatorade removed brominated vegetable oil from their product, which was kind of amazing, to respond to a 15-year-old girl in Alabama, that she had this effect. So, Gatorade—I guess we can think of Gatorade as being slightly healthier. But still, it has an enormous amount of sugar, and it’s basically sugar water. And it’s unfortunate that Gatorade is often marketed to kids who are involved in sports activities, and people are convinced somehow that our kids need Gatorade after an hour soccer game instead of—instead of water, which is always the best way to rehydrate. I mean, you drink Gatorade, and you’re getting quite a lot of sugar.

AMYGOODMAN: I mean, this is amazing, a 15-year-old girl, this ingredient banned in other countries.

MELANIEWARNER: Banned in other countries. And it’s kind of a surprising ingredient, because it was—it was a subject of a number of concerning studies in the '70s. And the FDA looked at these back then and decided that, OK, we'll let this ingredient be on the market, but conditionally: only pending further studies to make sure that things are really OK. And those studies have really never been done. And it’s just one—it’s one illustration of the way that there’s a lot of ingredients that—there’s actually 5,000 additives that are allowed to be added to food in the United States. And there’s—it’s just one example of how there are a number of those ingredients that really slip through the cracks and are really not being subjected to a close, scrutinizing eye by the government, specifically the FDA, that people—that people might assume and that we might like them to be doing.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to go back to a few things. One is that Pepsi-Cola owns Gatorade. And then just what Sarah Kavanagh, this 15-year-old smarty pants—she’s remarkably smart—wrote. She said, "The other day I Googled 'brominated vegetable oil.' It was the last time I drank Orange Gatorade. I found out that this 'BVO' is a controversial flame retardant chemical that is in some Gatorade drinks! Who wants to drink that? Not me!" And, you know, she got this mega-multinational corporation to cave, saying they’re going to replace it with a substitute. But what’s the substitute, Melanie?

MELANIEWARNER: Oh, gosh, you know, I forget. It’s something—I’ve been meaning to look it up. It’s something—it’s another highly processed chemical that I had never heard of. And yeah, it’s worth looking—

AMYGOODMAN: I’m sure Sarah will be on it.

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah, it’s worth looking into that. But the point is—and the thing that Sarah discovered—is that it’s not used in other countries, specifically in Europe, and the companies find alternatives in other countries. The same is true of food dyes. It’s considered—food dyes, like Red 40 and Blue 1, you see on ingredient lists. They are considered to be linked to hyperactivity in children in Europe. And so, if you go to Europe, you see products that have warning labels on them indicating this. And actually, the food companies—there are not very many products in Europe that actually contain these ingredients, because food companies don’t want to put that kind of a warning label on their products. So they’re able to—they find alternatives. They use more natural food colorings.

AMYGOODMAN: Melanie, talk about extrusion machines.

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah, extrusion machines. This is—these are one of the—the type of machinery that the food industry uses that nobody has in their home kitchen. The closest thing you could compare it to is maybe a homemade pasta maker, but that’s a very far cry. These are highly efficient machines. They are—they have steel, really heavy screws inside them that turn, create enormous amount of pressure and what food scientists call "shear." And they’re very effective. You can put a whole bunch of ingredients into one side of an extruder, and it pops out, or extrudes, on the other side. There’s a die. You can have it in any kind of shape you want. You could have it for—shape of a—letters of the alphabet, like for alphabet cereal, or honeycombs. Or you could have it for Chicken McNuggets. And out on the other side pops a pretty much fully formed product. And one of the unfortunate thing about extruders is that they’re very good at efficiently making products—you can zip things in and out of there in a minute—but they are fairly damaging to nutrition, particularly certain vitamins and also sometimes—sometimes fiber.

]]>
Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:17:00 -0400Part 2: "Pandora's Lunchbox" and the Truth About Soy Protein in Processed Food Watch part two of our interview with with author Melanie Warner, longtime food reporter and author of the newly published book, Pandora&#8217;s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal . In our extended conversation, she examines a very common ingredient in processed food: soy protein.
Click here to see part one of this interview with Warner, when she describes how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive and most nutritionally inferior food in the world.
See all of Democracy Now! &#8217;s coverage of food issues.
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. Melanie Warner is joining us, longtime journalist covering the food industry. Her new book is called Pandora&#8217;s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal . Melanie, can you talk about soy products?
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, I think soy is one of the more confusing products out there for people. I mean, there—and the problem is, there&#8217;s soy, and there&#8217;s soy. So you have traditional soy products that have been consumed in Asia for centuries, and these are things like miso and tempeh. These are fermented soy products that are actually quite healthy. Tempeh, for instance, has beneficial bacteria in it, much like yogurt does. People don&#8217;t always realize that. And then you have—
AMY GOODMAN : I&#8217;m a great devotee of tempeh. I love tempeh.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, and it&#8217;s actually quite delicious, more so than tofu. And so—
AMY GOODMAN : I agree.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah. And then you have—and then you have the other kind of soy products, which is these highly processed soy products, which are very predominant ingredients in processed food.
So, for instance, soybean oil. Soybean oil has been the leading fat that&#8217;s been in processed food for the past five or six decades. It&#8217;s so prevalent that it consumes—my estimation was that it—we&#8217;re consuming 10 percent of our total daily calories from soybean oil, in part because it&#8217;s in—used to fry a lot of foods. So, soybean oil is something that when you go to the grocery store, I&#8217;ve seen—I&#8217;ve seen it listed on chip packages as a simple, natural ingredient. And if you look at bottles of cooking oil over in a different aisle, it&#8217;ll say &quot;100 percent natural.&quot; But I spent a fair amount of time learning about how soybean oil is produced, and when you find out about it, you realize it doesn&#8217;t scream &quot;natural&quot; at all. The main process uses a chemical called hexane, which is known to be a neurotoxic chemical. And they use that to leech the oil out of the soybeans. It&#8217;s very efficient at doing that. And then they vacuum it off. So the idea is that no hexane remains in the final oil, or if any does, it&#8217;s small amounts. And then soybean oil goes through other processes, like bleaching and deodorizing. And this has the effect of removing some of the healthy things that would otherwise be in soybean oil, like vitamin E and compounds called phytosterols. So—and then sometimes there&#8217;s more processes, like hydrogenation, this relatively new process called interesterification. So this is a very processed processed oil that we&#8217;re consuming.
And then you could look at something like soy protein, which comes after the soybean oil production. And that is also something that, by the time it gets to be soy protein—I spent some time inside a soy protein manufacturing plant; this one was outside of—outside of Memphis—and saw these giant hissing and whirling machines and all these chemicals that go into the process in the making of this, that by the time it gets—and there are so many steps—that by the time you get to soy protein, you have almost no nutrition there. Soybeans are this tidy package of vitamins and minerals and fiber and phytosterols, and by the time you get to soy protein, really all you have left is protein, and everything else has been processed out.
AMY GOODMAN : So, how do you look for what&#8217;s good or bad when you&#8217;re buying food, in terms of the ingredient list? And let me go to a subject that might surprise people: Subway. You know, it&#8217;s being touted as the great both, yes, chain, but healthy alternative, because the bread is baked, you know, in the store, and there are a lot of vegetables that are included. I was shocked, on page 11 of &quot;Weird Science,&quot; where you talk about the number of ingredients of a Subway sweet onion chicken teriyaki sandwich. And for folks who like little quizzes, guess how many ingredients there are in a Subway sweet onion chicken teriyaki sandwich. The answer would be 105. Fifty-five are dry, dusty substances that were added to the sandwich for a whole variety of reasons. I&#8217;m going to try to read some of these. &quot;The chicken contains thirteen: potassium chloride, maltodextrin, autolyzed yeast extract, gum Arabic, salt, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, fructose, dextrose, thiamine hydrochloride, soy protein concentrate, modified potato starch, sodium phosphates. The teriyaki glaze has twelve: sodium benzoate, modified food starch, salt, sugar, acetic acid, maltodextrin, corn starch, spice, wheat, natural flavoring, garlic powder, yeast extract. The fat-free sweet onion sauce, you get another eight.&quot; And it goes on from there. I don&#8217;t have any of these ingredients in my cupboards, Melanie.
MELANIE WARNER : Amy, you did a great job pronouncing all that. I&#8217;m very impressed. I think it&#8217;s very important—I spent a lot of time looking at ingredient lists, and I think it&#8217;s very important to look at what goes into your food. It&#8217;s important to look at the amount of sugar and sodium in your food, but also look at the ingredients and see what&#8217;s in there. And if there are a zillion ingredients, 30 ingredients for a given product, that is a highly processed product. And if there are things that you don&#8217;t recognize, that&#8217;s something that you might—you might want to think about looking in the grocery store for things that have a lot more simple, simple ingredient lists. And think about, is this something—is this a real food, or is this a highly processed product that has a dubious relationship to something natural that once grew on a farm? And I think you can do that by using common sense and also by looking at the ingredient list and thinking, &quot;Is this something that I could actually—that I could actually make at home?&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : What about Gatorade?
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, Gatorade was the subject of a recent controversy, where a teenager in Alabama discovered that there was an ingredient called brominated vegetable oil in her Gatorade. And she was—she was surprised to learn this because bromine, which is used to make brominated vegetable oil, is a flame retardant. So she circulated a petition, and as some petitions do nowadays, it became widely, wildly popular. And the result was that Gatorade removed brominated vegetable oil from their product, which was kind of amazing, to respond to a 15-year-old girl in Alabama, that she had this effect. So, Gatorade—I guess we can think of Gatorade as being slightly healthier. But still, it has an enormous amount of sugar, and it&#8217;s basically sugar water. And it&#8217;s unfortunate that Gatorade is often marketed to kids who are involved in sports activities, and people are convinced somehow that our kids need Gatorade after an hour soccer game instead of—instead of water, which is always the best way to rehydrate. I mean, you drink Gatorade, and you&#8217;re getting quite a lot of sugar.
AMY GOODMAN : I mean, this is amazing, a 15-year-old girl, this ingredient banned in other countries.
MELANIE WARNER : Banned in other countries. And it&#8217;s kind of a surprising ingredient, because it was—it was a subject of a number of concerning studies in the &#39;70s. And the FDA looked at these back then and decided that, OK, we&#39;ll let this ingredient be on the market, but conditionally: only pending further studies to make sure that things are really OK. And those studies have really never been done. And it&#8217;s just one—it&#8217;s one illustration of the way that there&#8217;s a lot of ingredients that—there&#8217;s actually 5,000 additives that are allowed to be added to food in the United States. And there&#8217;s—it&#8217;s just one example of how there are a number of those ingredients that really slip through the cracks and are really not being subjected to a close, scrutinizing eye by the government, specifically the FDA , that people—that people might assume and that we might like them to be doing.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go back to a few things. One is that Pepsi-Cola owns Gatorade. And then just what Sarah Kavanagh, this 15-year-old smarty pants—she&#8217;s remarkably smart—wrote. She said, &quot;The other day I Googled &#39;brominated vegetable oil.&#39; It was the last time I drank Orange Gatorade. I found out that this &#39; BVO &#39; is a controversial flame retardant chemical that is in some Gatorade drinks! Who wants to drink that? Not me!&quot; And, you know, she got this mega-multinational corporation to cave, saying they&#8217;re going to replace it with a substitute. But what&#8217;s the substitute, Melanie?
MELANIE WARNER : Oh, gosh, you know, I forget. It&#8217;s something—I&#8217;ve been meaning to look it up. It&#8217;s something—it&#8217;s another highly processed chemical that I had never heard of. And yeah, it&#8217;s worth looking—
AMY GOODMAN : I&#8217;m sure Sarah will be on it.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, it&#8217;s worth looking into that. But the point is—and the thing that Sarah discovered—is that it&#8217;s not used in other countries, specifically in Europe, and the companies find alternatives in other countries. The same is true of food dyes. It&#8217;s considered—food dyes, like Red 40 and Blue 1, you see on ingredient lists. They are considered to be linked to hyperactivity in children in Europe. And so, if you go to Europe, you see products that have warning labels on them indicating this. And actually, the food companies—there are not very many products in Europe that actually contain these ingredients, because food companies don&#8217;t want to put that kind of a warning label on their products. So they&#8217;re able to—they find alternatives. They use more natural food colorings.
AMY GOODMAN : Melanie, talk about extrusion machines.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, extrusion machines. This is—these are one of the—the type of machinery that the food industry uses that nobody has in their home kitchen. The closest thing you could compare it to is maybe a homemade pasta maker, but that&#8217;s a very far cry. These are highly efficient machines. They are—they have steel, really heavy screws inside them that turn, create enormous amount of pressure and what food scientists call &quot;shear.&quot; And they&#8217;re very effective. You can put a whole bunch of ingredients into one side of an extruder, and it pops out, or extrudes, on the other side. There&#8217;s a die. You can have it in any kind of shape you want. You could have it for—shape of a—letters of the alphabet, like for alphabet cereal, or honeycombs. Or you could have it for Chicken McNuggets. And out on the other side pops a pretty much fully formed product. And one of the unfortunate thing about extruders is that they&#8217;re very good at efficiently making products—you can zip things in and out of there in a minute—but they are fairly damaging to nutrition, particularly certain vitamins and also sometimes—sometimes fiber. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsPart 2: "Pandora's Lunchbox" and the Truth About Soy Protein in Processed Food Watch part two of our interview with with author Melanie Warner, longtime food reporter and author of the newly published book, Pandora&#8217;s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal . In our extended conversation, she examines a very common ingredient in processed food: soy protein.
Click here to see part one of this interview with Warner, when she describes how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive and most nutritionally inferior food in the world.
See all of Democracy Now! &#8217;s coverage of food issues.
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. Melanie Warner is joining us, longtime journalist covering the food industry. Her new book is called Pandora&#8217;s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal . Melanie, can you talk about soy products?
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, I think soy is one of the more confusing products out there for people. I mean, there—and the problem is, there&#8217;s soy, and there&#8217;s soy. So you have traditional soy products that have been consumed in Asia for centuries, and these are things like miso and tempeh. These are fermented soy products that are actually quite healthy. Tempeh, for instance, has beneficial bacteria in it, much like yogurt does. People don&#8217;t always realize that. And then you have—
AMY GOODMAN : I&#8217;m a great devotee of tempeh. I love tempeh.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, and it&#8217;s actually quite delicious, more so than tofu. And so—
AMY GOODMAN : I agree.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah. And then you have—and then you have the other kind of soy products, which is these highly processed soy products, which are very predominant ingredients in processed food.
So, for instance, soybean oil. Soybean oil has been the leading fat that&#8217;s been in processed food for the past five or six decades. It&#8217;s so prevalent that it consumes—my estimation was that it—we&#8217;re consuming 10 percent of our total daily calories from soybean oil, in part because it&#8217;s in—used to fry a lot of foods. So, soybean oil is something that when you go to the grocery store, I&#8217;ve seen—I&#8217;ve seen it listed on chip packages as a simple, natural ingredient. And if you look at bottles of cooking oil over in a different aisle, it&#8217;ll say &quot;100 percent natural.&quot; But I spent a fair amount of time learning about how soybean oil is produced, and when you find out about it, you realize it doesn&#8217;t scream &quot;natural&quot; at all. The main process uses a chemical called hexane, which is known to be a neurotoxic chemical. And they use that to leech the oil out of the soybeans. It&#8217;s very efficient at doing that. And then they vacuum it off. So the idea is that no hexane remains in the final oil, or if any does, it&#8217;s small amounts. And then soybean oil goes through other processes, like bleaching and deodorizing. And this has the effect of removing some of the healthy things that would otherwise be in soybean oil, like vitamin E and compounds called phytosterols. So—and then sometimes there&#8217;s more processes, like hydrogenation, this relatively new process called interesterification. So this is a very processed processed oil that we&#8217;re consuming.
And then you could look at something like soy protein, which comes after the soybean oil production. And that is also something that, by the time it gets to be soy protein—I spent some time inside a soy protein manufacturing plant; this one was outside of—outside of Memphis—and saw these giant hissing and whirling machines and all these chemicals that go into the process in the making of this, that by the time it gets—and there are so many steps—that by the time you get to soy protein, you have almost no nutrition there. Soybeans are this tidy package of vitamins and minerals and fiber and phytosterols, and by the time you get to soy protein, really all you have left is protein, and everything else has been processed out.
AMY GOODMAN : So, how do you look for what&#8217;s good or bad when you&#8217;re buying food, in terms of the ingredient list? And let me go to a subject that might surprise people: Subway. You know, it&#8217;s being touted as the great both, yes, chain, but healthy alternative, because the bread is baked, you know, in the store, and there are a lot of vegetables that are included. I was shocked, on page 11 of &quot;Weird Science,&quot; where you talk about the number of ingredients of a Subway sweet onion chicken teriyaki sandwich. And for folks who like little quizzes, guess how many ingredients there are in a Subway sweet onion chicken teriyaki sandwich. The answer would be 105. Fifty-five are dry, dusty substances that were added to the sandwich for a whole variety of reasons. I&#8217;m going to try to read some of these. &quot;The chicken contains thirteen: potassium chloride, maltodextrin, autolyzed yeast extract, gum Arabic, salt, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, fructose, dextrose, thiamine hydrochloride, soy protein concentrate, modified potato starch, sodium phosphates. The teriyaki glaze has twelve: sodium benzoate, modified food starch, salt, sugar, acetic acid, maltodextrin, corn starch, spice, wheat, natural flavoring, garlic powder, yeast extract. The fat-free sweet onion sauce, you get another eight.&quot; And it goes on from there. I don&#8217;t have any of these ingredients in my cupboards, Melanie.
MELANIE WARNER : Amy, you did a great job pronouncing all that. I&#8217;m very impressed. I think it&#8217;s very important—I spent a lot of time looking at ingredient lists, and I think it&#8217;s very important to look at what goes into your food. It&#8217;s important to look at the amount of sugar and sodium in your food, but also look at the ingredients and see what&#8217;s in there. And if there are a zillion ingredients, 30 ingredients for a given product, that is a highly processed product. And if there are things that you don&#8217;t recognize, that&#8217;s something that you might—you might want to think about looking in the grocery store for things that have a lot more simple, simple ingredient lists. And think about, is this something—is this a real food, or is this a highly processed product that has a dubious relationship to something natural that once grew on a farm? And I think you can do that by using common sense and also by looking at the ingredient list and thinking, &quot;Is this something that I could actually—that I could actually make at home?&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : What about Gatorade?
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, Gatorade was the subject of a recent controversy, where a teenager in Alabama discovered that there was an ingredient called brominated vegetable oil in her Gatorade. And she was—she was surprised to learn this because bromine, which is used to make brominated vegetable oil, is a flame retardant. So she circulated a petition, and as some petitions do nowadays, it became widely, wildly popular. And the result was that Gatorade removed brominated vegetable oil from their product, which was kind of amazing, to respond to a 15-year-old girl in Alabama, that she had this effect. So, Gatorade—I guess we can think of Gatorade as being slightly healthier. But still, it has an enormous amount of sugar, and it&#8217;s basically sugar water. And it&#8217;s unfortunate that Gatorade is often marketed to kids who are involved in sports activities, and people are convinced somehow that our kids need Gatorade after an hour soccer game instead of—instead of water, which is always the best way to rehydrate. I mean, you drink Gatorade, and you&#8217;re getting quite a lot of sugar.
AMY GOODMAN : I mean, this is amazing, a 15-year-old girl, this ingredient banned in other countries.
MELANIE WARNER : Banned in other countries. And it&#8217;s kind of a surprising ingredient, because it was—it was a subject of a number of concerning studies in the &#39;70s. And the FDA looked at these back then and decided that, OK, we&#39;ll let this ingredient be on the market, but conditionally: only pending further studies to make sure that things are really OK. And those studies have really never been done. And it&#8217;s just one—it&#8217;s one illustration of the way that there&#8217;s a lot of ingredients that—there&#8217;s actually 5,000 additives that are allowed to be added to food in the United States. And there&#8217;s—it&#8217;s just one example of how there are a number of those ingredients that really slip through the cracks and are really not being subjected to a close, scrutinizing eye by the government, specifically the FDA , that people—that people might assume and that we might like them to be doing.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go back to a few things. One is that Pepsi-Cola owns Gatorade. And then just what Sarah Kavanagh, this 15-year-old smarty pants—she&#8217;s remarkably smart—wrote. She said, &quot;The other day I Googled &#39;brominated vegetable oil.&#39; It was the last time I drank Orange Gatorade. I found out that this &#39; BVO &#39; is a controversial flame retardant chemical that is in some Gatorade drinks! Who wants to drink that? Not me!&quot; And, you know, she got this mega-multinational corporation to cave, saying they&#8217;re going to replace it with a substitute. But what&#8217;s the substitute, Melanie?
MELANIE WARNER : Oh, gosh, you know, I forget. It&#8217;s something—I&#8217;ve been meaning to look it up. It&#8217;s something—it&#8217;s another highly processed chemical that I had never heard of. And yeah, it&#8217;s worth looking—
AMY GOODMAN : I&#8217;m sure Sarah will be on it.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, it&#8217;s worth looking into that. But the point is—and the thing that Sarah discovered—is that it&#8217;s not used in other countries, specifically in Europe, and the companies find alternatives in other countries. The same is true of food dyes. It&#8217;s considered—food dyes, like Red 40 and Blue 1, you see on ingredient lists. They are considered to be linked to hyperactivity in children in Europe. And so, if you go to Europe, you see products that have warning labels on them indicating this. And actually, the food companies—there are not very many products in Europe that actually contain these ingredients, because food companies don&#8217;t want to put that kind of a warning label on their products. So they&#8217;re able to—they find alternatives. They use more natural food colorings.
AMY GOODMAN : Melanie, talk about extrusion machines.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, extrusion machines. This is—these are one of the—the type of machinery that the food industry uses that nobody has in their home kitchen. The closest thing you could compare it to is maybe a homemade pasta maker, but that&#8217;s a very far cry. These are highly efficient machines. They are—they have steel, really heavy screws inside them that turn, create enormous amount of pressure and what food scientists call &quot;shear.&quot; And they&#8217;re very effective. You can put a whole bunch of ingredients into one side of an extruder, and it pops out, or extrudes, on the other side. There&#8217;s a die. You can have it in any kind of shape you want. You could have it for—shape of a—letters of the alphabet, like for alphabet cereal, or honeycombs. Or you could have it for Chicken McNuggets. And out on the other side pops a pretty much fully formed product. And one of the unfortunate thing about extruders is that they&#8217;re very good at efficiently making products—you can zip things in and out of there in a minute—but they are fairly damaging to nutrition, particularly certain vitamins and also sometimes—sometimes fiber. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsSalt Sugar Fat: NY Times Reporter Michael Moss on How the Food Giants Hooked America on Junk Foodhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/1/salt_sugar_fat_ny_times_reporter
tag:democracynow.org,2013-03-01:en/story/387443 AMY GOODMAN : We spend the rest of the hour going deep inside the &quot;processed-food-industrial complex,&quot; beginning with the &quot;The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.&quot; That was the cover story in the recent New York Times Magazine that examined how food companies have known for decades that salt, sugar and fat are not good for us in the quantities American&#8217;s consume them, and yet every year they convince most of us to ingest about twice the recommended amount of salt, 70 pounds of sugar—22 teaspoons a day. Then, there&#8217;s the fat. Well, New York Times reporter Michael Moss explains how one of the most prevalent fat delivery methods is cheese.
MICHAEL MOSS : Every year, the average American eats as much as 33 pounds of cheese. That&#8217;s up to 60,000 calories and 3,100 grams of saturated fat. So why do we eat so much cheese? Mainly it&#8217;s because the government is in cahoots with the processed food industry. And instead of responding in earnest to the health crisis, they&#8217;ve spent the past 30 years getting people to eat more. This is the story of how we ended up doing just that.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss. His new book is called Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us . He goes deep inside the laboratories where food scientists calculate the &quot;bliss point&quot; of sugary drinks or the &quot;mouth feel&quot; of fat, and use advanced technology to make it irresistible and addictive. As a result of this $1 trillion-a-year industry, one-in-three adults, and one-in-five kids, is now clinically obese.
In a bit, we&#8217;ll look ever further into the process of making processed foods, with Melanie Warner, author of Pandora&#8217;s Lunchbox . But first, Michael Moss joins us here in the studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Michael. You—
MICHAEL MOSS : Thanks for having me.
AMY GOODMAN : You open your book with a remarkable summit. Talk about who was there.
MICHAEL MOSS : This is a meeting in 1999 that engaged the CEOs of some of the largest food companies in the country, and they were presented with a vivid picture of the emerging obesity crisis. And what really amazed me about this meeting, when I found out about it and found the records to it and talked to some of the people who were present, is that it was none other than one of their own, a senior executive at Kraft, who basically laid the emerging obesity crisis at the feet of the processed food industry and pleaded with them to do something collectively to turn the corner.
AMY GOODMAN : What happened?
MICHAEL MOSS : And coming from him, it was just so powerful. They reacted, as you can imagine, rather defensively. They said, &quot;Look, we&#8217;re already providing people with choices in the grocery store. We are committed to nutrition, as we are to convenience and low prices.&quot; Frankly, they were worried about the lost millions in sales if healthier products they created weren&#8217;t as attractive as the ones they do make.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the CEO who basically ended the meeting.
MICHAEL MOSS : The head of General Mills made all of these points and was especially, I think, aghast at being blamed for the obesity crisis, because, again, he felt that in the cereal aisle, for example, General Mills was providing Cheerios with low amounts of sugar, and he didn&#8217;t see a need to down-formulate, if you will, all of the products in the grocery store in order to deal with this obesity crisis, which, you have to remember, back in &#8217;99, was not as grave as it is today.
AMY GOODMAN : And, of course, the obesity crisis, I mean, in their terms, is about lawsuits, class action lawsuits. What does obesity mean? Why is this such a critical issue?
MICHAEL MOSS : Well, yes and no. The Kraft official who raised this back in 1999 was actually very deeply and sincerely concerned about the health effects on people and not so worried about litigation.
What this did, though, mean to the companies, though, was—was what I write about in the book, which, I have to tell you, Amy, was a bit of a detective story. I managed to come across a trove of internal documents that enabled me to get insiders to talk. And when they did, what it showed was that salt, sugar, fat are the three pillars, the Holy Grail, if you will, on which the food industry survives. And through their research, they know that when they hit the perfect amounts of each of those ingredients, they&#8217;ll send us over the moon, products will fly off the shelves, we&#8217;ll eat more, we&#8217;ll buy more—and being companies, of course, that they will make more money.
AMY GOODMAN : Name names, and talk about examples of the weaponizing of salt, sugar and fat.
MICHAEL MOSS : One of the senior—one of the legendary senior scientists for the food industry, Howard Moskowitz, walked me through his creation recently of a new soda for Dr. Pepper, a new flavor line. And it was amazing how much effort went into that—you know, a regression analysis, high mathematics. He would take dozens and dozens of formulas, just slightly altered, to find what he calls the &quot;bliss point&quot; for sweetness in the sugar. And you can do this own experiment at home. Take a cup of coffee, keep adding sugar until you reach the point that you like it the most, and then when you add more sugar, you actually like it less. Well, the food industry knows that, and they spend huge amounts of effort finding the perfect spot, not just for sugar, but for fat and salt, as well.
AMY GOODMAN : Frito-Lay had scientist Robert I-San [Lin].
MICHAEL MOSS : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Talks about people getting addicted to salt.
MICHAEL MOSS : Yes. He was a wonderful, brilliant scientist who worked—went to work for Frito-Lay in the late &#8217;70s, when salt became an issue in Washington, and the FDA started holding hearings looking at whether potentially it should regulate salt and not consider it inherently safe. Dr. Lin began pushing Frito-Lay to cut back on salt in its own products, for economic reasons. He thought it would position the company really well. And he left Frito-Lay. And years later, when I met him and we went through the documents that he saved from his days at Frito-Lay, it was just amazing to sit down with him at his dining room table and listen to his regrets at not having been able to have done more way back in the &#8217;70s and early &#8217;80s.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the tobacco industry&#8217;s effect on the food industry, Michael Moss.
MICHAEL MOSS : I love this part of the story, because it&#8217;s really surprising. Philip Morris became the largest food manufacturer in the United States starting in the late &#39;80s, when it acquired General Foods and then Kraft. And as you can imagine, for the first decade of that ownership, it pushed the food managers to do everything they could to sell their products. But starting in the late &#8217;90s, when Philip Morris came under increasing pressure for nicotine and tobacco—and it was the first tobacco company to acknowledge or, rather, to accept the idea of government regulation—the Philip Morris officials turned to their food people and said, &quot;You guys&quot; — and this is private, of course — &quot;You guys are going to face the same issue we&#39;re facing over nicotine with salt, sugar, fat and obesity.&quot; And they began nudging their food managers to start thinking about ways to ease back on their dependence on those three ingredients.
AMY GOODMAN : The problem with obesity, what it means for, for example, children?
MICHAEL MOSS : You know, in my own household, I have two boys, eight and 13. And you can just see the sugar craving that kids have, inevitably, for sugar. You know, we&#8217;ve tried to work with our grocery shopping to get control and to—and I think that&#8217;s one of the key things—
AMY GOODMAN : How do you do it with your kids?
MICHAEL MOSS : Well, so, with the kids, my wife Eve kind of arbitrarily said, &quot;Hey, guys, let&#8217;s try to limit your cereal, when we eat cereal in the morning, to five grams or less of sugar.&quot; And we found that when you engage them in that, shopping becomes an Easter egg hunt, and they&#8217;re able to go to the cereal aisle and find those cereals that meet that quota. And they may have to reach low, or I may have to reach high, to find them, because the most sugary ones tend to be at eye level, by calculation. But I think it&#8217;s a really important issue, is—you just can&#8217;t throw fresh carrots and fresh apples at kids without engaging them. They&#8217;ll chuck them out in the lunchroom. But if we could invigorate the home economics program in this country, which fell by the waysides, I think that would be a huge—
AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean, home economics?
MICHAEL MOSS : Well, home economics—kids in school used to be taught how to shop, how to cook from scratch, how to be in control of their diets. Doesn&#8217;t happen anymore. And I write about this in the book. What did happen is we got Betty Crocker, a figment of the imagination of a marketing official at a food company. She began pushing processed foods, convenience foods, as an alternative to scratch cooking.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain more.
MICHAEL MOSS : This was back in the &#39;50s and &#8217;60s. Betty Crocker, as you all know—I mean, I used to think she was a real person. She wasn&#39;t. She started out just as a marketing tool for the companies. But she was—became emblematic of the food industry&#8217;s usurpation, if you will, of the home economist. And their notion was, &quot;Hey, look, who&#8217;s got time for scratch meals anymore? Let&#8217;s encourage consumers to buy our convenience foods to make things easier for them.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about Lunchables, how they were invented, what they mean.
MICHAEL MOSS : I got to interview and see documents that were kept by Bob Drane, who worked for Oscar Meyer back in the &#8217;80s when the company faced a problem with its meat. People were cutting back on consumption of red meat because it has saturated fat and salt. And Mr. Drane and his team set about looking for a way to repackage those products. He was most interested in saving jobs, and he cared very much about the company. And they came up with the Lunchables, which, as you know, is basically a TV—a cold TV dinner aimed at kids for school lunches.
But it has two remarkable things beyond kind of the ingredients that they used—meat, cheese, crackers, typically. First they went after working moms, who work outside of the home, and designed it and marketed it as a way for moms to get through the crush of the—the 7 a.m. crush in the household where everybody&#8217;s scrambling to get out of the house and off to school and work. But then they went after the kids with an amazing marketing campaign, because they realized that the Lunchables wasn&#8217;t about food. It was about empowerment for kids. And they came up with this slogan: &quot;All day, you gotta do what they say. But lunchtime is all yours.&quot; And kids went nuts for it. Pizza Lunchables, think about it. It&#8217;s a piece of cold dough, cheese, tomato sauce, that the kids assemble themselves. But that meant everything to kids, and sales skyrocketed.
AMY GOODMAN : And then they added dessert.
MICHAEL MOSS : And then they added dessert, hamburger Lunchables, hot dog Lunchables, pancake Lunchables—some of them with huge loads of salt, sugar, fat. Kraft, to its credit, is now pulling back on those ingredients, and you can actually find some much lower amounts. But it opened the door to something really important, which is the fast-food industry has moved into the grocery store, so you no longer have to go to a fast-food chain to find problematic foods.
AMY GOODMAN : Michael Moss, talk about cheese. Talk more about cheese.
MICHAEL MOSS : So, I was amazed to hear that figure, that we are, on average, eating as much as 33 pounds of cheese a year. And I thought, &quot;How could that be?&quot; And that&#8217;s triple the amount back in the &#39;70s. And the story goes like this. Starting in the &#8217;60s, people began drinking less whole milk as a way of reducing calories and intake of saturated fat. That left the dairy industry with a glut of whole milk and the milk fat they were extracting from the whole milk to make skim milk. They went to the government and asked for help. And they started making more cheese with that milk. The government, since it subsidizes the dairy industry, bought the cheese. It accumulated. It was storing the cheese in caves in Missouri, when none other than Ronald Reagan came into office and says, &quot;This is crazy. We&#39;ve got $4 billion worth of cheese that&#8217;s going moldy. Stop it.&quot; But they still wanted to support the industry, so they came up with a marketing scheme that allowed the dairy industry to collect tens of millions of dollars every year to encourage consumers—for advertising and marketing, to encourage consumers to eat more cheese, not just as a delicacy that you eat as an hors d&#8217;oeuvre before dinner, but as an ingredient in processed food. And so, suddenly, cheese began showing up as slices on sandwiches, as ingredients in packaged foods in the store. And our consumption of saturated fat, while we thought we were taking it out of our diets, snuck back in, because cheese is largely invisible as a fat in that form.
AMY GOODMAN : Michael Moss, Jeffrey Dunn, whistleblower, or at least quit Coke. He was in charge of, what, $44 billion of sale of Coke.
MICHAEL MOSS : Wasn&#8217;t quite that much. He was in charge of North America and Latin America. But I&#8217;m glad you raise that, because—
AMY GOODMAN : Rather, $20 billion.
MICHAEL MOSS : Jeffrey Dunn was the top warrior at Coke, and he was the heir apparent, or one of the heir apparents, of the entire company in 2000, when he began having a change of heart. And, by the way, he walked me through all the incredible marketing strategy that Coke has, including targeting the most vulnerable consumers, which the company calls &quot;heavy users.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Don&#8217;t call them &quot;consumers&quot; anymore; they&#8217;re &quot;heavy users.&quot;
MICHAEL MOSS : &quot;Heavy users.&quot; Twenty percent of their customers drink 80 percent of the Coke, and those are the people that it&#8217;s gone after. But starting in 2000, Jeffrey Dunn had a change of heart. It started with reading a book about sugar and the health effects. It went to his fiancée, who started like nudging him: &quot;Hey, Jeffrey, do you really want to be doing this with your life?&quot; And then he went to Brazil, where Coke was starting to market soda to the emerging middle class there. And out of the blue, Jeffrey says it was almost a voice he heard, said to him, &quot;Jeffrey, you know, you should—these kids need a lot of things, but one thing they don&#8217;t need is another Coke.&quot; He went back to the company, pushed them to work more on selling healthier drinks, including soda, and cut back on marketing to schools. He ultimately left the company.
And today, he is selling fresh carrots from a farm in California, but with this—and this is really important, because this may be one way out of the situation that we&#8217;re in: He is marketing carrots as junk food, meaning he&#8217;s stolen a page of the playbook from the junk food industry to make carrots attractive to kids. And I think that is so brilliant.
AMY GOODMAN : We should probably clarify that he was pushing, when we say &quot;Coke,&quot; though it sounds like when you&#8217;re talking about &quot;heavy users&quot; coke, cocaine, we&#8217;re talking Coca-Cola.
MICHAEL MOSS : Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN : And the problem with Coca-Cola and what it means and why, for example, when they pushed it to Mexico at the time of a terrible recession, they upped their advertising, because they thought, &quot;Well, if anyone&#8217;s got any money, they could put it into Coke.&quot;
MICHAEL MOSS : And Coke will say, &quot;Look, we&#8217;re only part of the&quot; — in fact, recently they had an ad campaign saying, &quot;Hey, we&#8217;re only part of the obesity crisis. You can&#8217;t blame everything on us, as calories is calories.&quot; But there is something interesting with liquids. Science is starting to show that our brains are less able to detect calories in liquids. So, people in the know, including food industry executives, when they run into health trouble, the first thing they do is cut calories out of all the liquids that they drink as a way of maintaining their weight.
AMY GOODMAN : What were you most shocked by?
MICHAEL MOSS : Well, it was one—one was that, how on a personal level, how so many executives I met don&#8217;t eat their own foods. The other thing I think that really shocked me was when I get to salt in the book, which is how dependent and how hooked the food companies are on salt, because it&#8217;s a miracle ingredient for them. It lets them avoid using more costly ingredients like spices and herbs, and of course has this thing they called &quot;flavor bursts,&quot; which just gets you so excited about eating snack foods, especially.
But the other thing is, salt masks off-notes or bad flavors that are inherent to some processed foods. In meat, it&#8217;s called &quot;warmed-over flavor,&quot; which happens when the fat in meat oxidizes when it reheats, and salt is one of those things that can cover up that taste. So I was really struck. And Kellogg invited me into their research and development department, made for me special versions of their icons, like Cheez-Its, which I could normally eat all day long. Without any salt, it was the most God-awful experience you can imagine, tasting those items. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
AMY GOODMAN : Michael Moss, I want to thank you for being with us. His book is called Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us . His cover story in last Sunday&#8217;s New York Times Magazine , &quot;The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.&quot; This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . Michael Moss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. He won in 2010 for his investigation into the dangers of contaminated meat.
But we&#8217;re not leaving food. When we come back, we&#8217;ll be joined by another New York Times reporter, Melanie Warner, who wrote Pandora&#8217;s Lunchbox . You don&#8217;t want to miss it—or maybe you do. It depends on what you&#8217;re eating these days. Stay with us. AMYGOODMAN: We spend the rest of the hour going deep inside the "processed-food-industrial complex," beginning with the "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food." That was the cover story in the recent New York Times Magazine that examined how food companies have known for decades that salt, sugar and fat are not good for us in the quantities American’s consume them, and yet every year they convince most of us to ingest about twice the recommended amount of salt, 70 pounds of sugar—22 teaspoons a day. Then, there’s the fat. Well, New York Times reporter Michael Moss explains how one of the most prevalent fat delivery methods is cheese.

MICHAELMOSS: Every year, the average American eats as much as 33 pounds of cheese. That’s up to 60,000 calories and 3,100 grams of saturated fat. So why do we eat so much cheese? Mainly it’s because the government is in cahoots with the processed food industry. And instead of responding in earnest to the health crisis, they’ve spent the past 30 years getting people to eat more. This is the story of how we ended up doing just that.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss. His new book is called Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. He goes deep inside the laboratories where food scientists calculate the "bliss point" of sugary drinks or the "mouth feel" of fat, and use advanced technology to make it irresistible and addictive. As a result of this $1 trillion-a-year industry, one-in-three adults, and one-in-five kids, is now clinically obese.

In a bit, we’ll look ever further into the process of making processed foods, with Melanie Warner, author of Pandora’s Lunchbox. But first, Michael Moss joins us here in the studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Michael. You—

MICHAELMOSS: Thanks for having me.

AMYGOODMAN: You open your book with a remarkable summit. Talk about who was there.

MICHAELMOSS: This is a meeting in 1999 that engaged the CEOs of some of the largest food companies in the country, and they were presented with a vivid picture of the emerging obesity crisis. And what really amazed me about this meeting, when I found out about it and found the records to it and talked to some of the people who were present, is that it was none other than one of their own, a senior executive at Kraft, who basically laid the emerging obesity crisis at the feet of the processed food industry and pleaded with them to do something collectively to turn the corner.

AMYGOODMAN: What happened?

MICHAELMOSS: And coming from him, it was just so powerful. They reacted, as you can imagine, rather defensively. They said, "Look, we’re already providing people with choices in the grocery store. We are committed to nutrition, as we are to convenience and low prices." Frankly, they were worried about the lost millions in sales if healthier products they created weren’t as attractive as the ones they do make.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the CEO who basically ended the meeting.

MICHAELMOSS: The head of General Mills made all of these points and was especially, I think, aghast at being blamed for the obesity crisis, because, again, he felt that in the cereal aisle, for example, General Mills was providing Cheerios with low amounts of sugar, and he didn’t see a need to down-formulate, if you will, all of the products in the grocery store in order to deal with this obesity crisis, which, you have to remember, back in ’99, was not as grave as it is today.

AMYGOODMAN: And, of course, the obesity crisis, I mean, in their terms, is about lawsuits, class action lawsuits. What does obesity mean? Why is this such a critical issue?

MICHAELMOSS: Well, yes and no. The Kraft official who raised this back in 1999 was actually very deeply and sincerely concerned about the health effects on people and not so worried about litigation.

What this did, though, mean to the companies, though, was—was what I write about in the book, which, I have to tell you, Amy, was a bit of a detective story. I managed to come across a trove of internal documents that enabled me to get insiders to talk. And when they did, what it showed was that salt, sugar, fat are the three pillars, the Holy Grail, if you will, on which the food industry survives. And through their research, they know that when they hit the perfect amounts of each of those ingredients, they’ll send us over the moon, products will fly off the shelves, we’ll eat more, we’ll buy more—and being companies, of course, that they will make more money.

AMYGOODMAN: Name names, and talk about examples of the weaponizing of salt, sugar and fat.

MICHAELMOSS: One of the senior—one of the legendary senior scientists for the food industry, Howard Moskowitz, walked me through his creation recently of a new soda for Dr. Pepper, a new flavor line. And it was amazing how much effort went into that—you know, a regression analysis, high mathematics. He would take dozens and dozens of formulas, just slightly altered, to find what he calls the "bliss point" for sweetness in the sugar. And you can do this own experiment at home. Take a cup of coffee, keep adding sugar until you reach the point that you like it the most, and then when you add more sugar, you actually like it less. Well, the food industry knows that, and they spend huge amounts of effort finding the perfect spot, not just for sugar, but for fat and salt, as well.

AMYGOODMAN: Frito-Lay had scientist Robert I-San [Lin].

MICHAELMOSS: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: Talks about people getting addicted to salt.

MICHAELMOSS: Yes. He was a wonderful, brilliant scientist who worked—went to work for Frito-Lay in the late ’70s, when salt became an issue in Washington, and the FDA started holding hearings looking at whether potentially it should regulate salt and not consider it inherently safe. Dr. Lin began pushing Frito-Lay to cut back on salt in its own products, for economic reasons. He thought it would position the company really well. And he left Frito-Lay. And years later, when I met him and we went through the documents that he saved from his days at Frito-Lay, it was just amazing to sit down with him at his dining room table and listen to his regrets at not having been able to have done more way back in the ’70s and early ’80s.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the tobacco industry’s effect on the food industry, Michael Moss.

MICHAELMOSS: I love this part of the story, because it’s really surprising. Philip Morris became the largest food manufacturer in the United States starting in the late '80s, when it acquired General Foods and then Kraft. And as you can imagine, for the first decade of that ownership, it pushed the food managers to do everything they could to sell their products. But starting in the late ’90s, when Philip Morris came under increasing pressure for nicotine and tobacco—and it was the first tobacco company to acknowledge or, rather, to accept the idea of government regulation—the Philip Morris officials turned to their food people and said, "You guys" — and this is private, of course — "You guys are going to face the same issue we're facing over nicotine with salt, sugar, fat and obesity." And they began nudging their food managers to start thinking about ways to ease back on their dependence on those three ingredients.

AMYGOODMAN: The problem with obesity, what it means for, for example, children?

MICHAELMOSS: You know, in my own household, I have two boys, eight and 13. And you can just see the sugar craving that kids have, inevitably, for sugar. You know, we’ve tried to work with our grocery shopping to get control and to—and I think that’s one of the key things—

AMYGOODMAN: How do you do it with your kids?

MICHAELMOSS: Well, so, with the kids, my wife Eve kind of arbitrarily said, "Hey, guys, let’s try to limit your cereal, when we eat cereal in the morning, to five grams or less of sugar." And we found that when you engage them in that, shopping becomes an Easter egg hunt, and they’re able to go to the cereal aisle and find those cereals that meet that quota. And they may have to reach low, or I may have to reach high, to find them, because the most sugary ones tend to be at eye level, by calculation. But I think it’s a really important issue, is—you just can’t throw fresh carrots and fresh apples at kids without engaging them. They’ll chuck them out in the lunchroom. But if we could invigorate the home economics program in this country, which fell by the waysides, I think that would be a huge—

AMYGOODMAN: What do you mean, home economics?

MICHAELMOSS: Well, home economics—kids in school used to be taught how to shop, how to cook from scratch, how to be in control of their diets. Doesn’t happen anymore. And I write about this in the book. What did happen is we got Betty Crocker, a figment of the imagination of a marketing official at a food company. She began pushing processed foods, convenience foods, as an alternative to scratch cooking.

AMYGOODMAN: Explain more.

MICHAELMOSS: This was back in the '50s and ’60s. Betty Crocker, as you all know—I mean, I used to think she was a real person. She wasn't. She started out just as a marketing tool for the companies. But she was—became emblematic of the food industry’s usurpation, if you will, of the home economist. And their notion was, "Hey, look, who’s got time for scratch meals anymore? Let’s encourage consumers to buy our convenience foods to make things easier for them."

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about Lunchables, how they were invented, what they mean.

MICHAELMOSS: I got to interview and see documents that were kept by Bob Drane, who worked for Oscar Meyer back in the ’80s when the company faced a problem with its meat. People were cutting back on consumption of red meat because it has saturated fat and salt. And Mr. Drane and his team set about looking for a way to repackage those products. He was most interested in saving jobs, and he cared very much about the company. And they came up with the Lunchables, which, as you know, is basically a TV—a cold TV dinner aimed at kids for school lunches.

But it has two remarkable things beyond kind of the ingredients that they used—meat, cheese, crackers, typically. First they went after working moms, who work outside of the home, and designed it and marketed it as a way for moms to get through the crush of the—the 7 a.m. crush in the household where everybody’s scrambling to get out of the house and off to school and work. But then they went after the kids with an amazing marketing campaign, because they realized that the Lunchables wasn’t about food. It was about empowerment for kids. And they came up with this slogan: "All day, you gotta do what they say. But lunchtime is all yours." And kids went nuts for it. Pizza Lunchables, think about it. It’s a piece of cold dough, cheese, tomato sauce, that the kids assemble themselves. But that meant everything to kids, and sales skyrocketed.

AMYGOODMAN: And then they added dessert.

MICHAELMOSS: And then they added dessert, hamburger Lunchables, hot dog Lunchables, pancake Lunchables—some of them with huge loads of salt, sugar, fat. Kraft, to its credit, is now pulling back on those ingredients, and you can actually find some much lower amounts. But it opened the door to something really important, which is the fast-food industry has moved into the grocery store, so you no longer have to go to a fast-food chain to find problematic foods.

AMYGOODMAN: Michael Moss, talk about cheese. Talk more about cheese.

MICHAELMOSS: So, I was amazed to hear that figure, that we are, on average, eating as much as 33 pounds of cheese a year. And I thought, "How could that be?" And that’s triple the amount back in the '70s. And the story goes like this. Starting in the ’60s, people began drinking less whole milk as a way of reducing calories and intake of saturated fat. That left the dairy industry with a glut of whole milk and the milk fat they were extracting from the whole milk to make skim milk. They went to the government and asked for help. And they started making more cheese with that milk. The government, since it subsidizes the dairy industry, bought the cheese. It accumulated. It was storing the cheese in caves in Missouri, when none other than Ronald Reagan came into office and says, "This is crazy. We've got $4 billion worth of cheese that’s going moldy. Stop it." But they still wanted to support the industry, so they came up with a marketing scheme that allowed the dairy industry to collect tens of millions of dollars every year to encourage consumers—for advertising and marketing, to encourage consumers to eat more cheese, not just as a delicacy that you eat as an hors d’oeuvre before dinner, but as an ingredient in processed food. And so, suddenly, cheese began showing up as slices on sandwiches, as ingredients in packaged foods in the store. And our consumption of saturated fat, while we thought we were taking it out of our diets, snuck back in, because cheese is largely invisible as a fat in that form.

AMYGOODMAN: Michael Moss, Jeffrey Dunn, whistleblower, or at least quit Coke. He was in charge of, what, $44 billion of sale of Coke.

MICHAELMOSS: Wasn’t quite that much. He was in charge of North America and Latin America. But I’m glad you raise that, because—

AMYGOODMAN: Rather, $20 billion.

MICHAELMOSS: Jeffrey Dunn was the top warrior at Coke, and he was the heir apparent, or one of the heir apparents, of the entire company in 2000, when he began having a change of heart. And, by the way, he walked me through all the incredible marketing strategy that Coke has, including targeting the most vulnerable consumers, which the company calls "heavy users."

MICHAELMOSS: "Heavy users." Twenty percent of their customers drink 80 percent of the Coke, and those are the people that it’s gone after. But starting in 2000, Jeffrey Dunn had a change of heart. It started with reading a book about sugar and the health effects. It went to his fiancée, who started like nudging him: "Hey, Jeffrey, do you really want to be doing this with your life?" And then he went to Brazil, where Coke was starting to market soda to the emerging middle class there. And out of the blue, Jeffrey says it was almost a voice he heard, said to him, "Jeffrey, you know, you should—these kids need a lot of things, but one thing they don’t need is another Coke." He went back to the company, pushed them to work more on selling healthier drinks, including soda, and cut back on marketing to schools. He ultimately left the company.

And today, he is selling fresh carrots from a farm in California, but with this—and this is really important, because this may be one way out of the situation that we’re in: He is marketing carrots as junk food, meaning he’s stolen a page of the playbook from the junk food industry to make carrots attractive to kids. And I think that is so brilliant.

AMYGOODMAN: We should probably clarify that he was pushing, when we say "Coke," though it sounds like when you’re talking about "heavy users" coke, cocaine, we’re talking Coca-Cola.

MICHAELMOSS: Absolutely.

AMYGOODMAN: And the problem with Coca-Cola and what it means and why, for example, when they pushed it to Mexico at the time of a terrible recession, they upped their advertising, because they thought, "Well, if anyone’s got any money, they could put it into Coke."

MICHAELMOSS: And Coke will say, "Look, we’re only part of the" — in fact, recently they had an ad campaign saying, "Hey, we’re only part of the obesity crisis. You can’t blame everything on us, as calories is calories." But there is something interesting with liquids. Science is starting to show that our brains are less able to detect calories in liquids. So, people in the know, including food industry executives, when they run into health trouble, the first thing they do is cut calories out of all the liquids that they drink as a way of maintaining their weight.

AMYGOODMAN: What were you most shocked by?

MICHAELMOSS: Well, it was one—one was that, how on a personal level, how so many executives I met don’t eat their own foods. The other thing I think that really shocked me was when I get to salt in the book, which is how dependent and how hooked the food companies are on salt, because it’s a miracle ingredient for them. It lets them avoid using more costly ingredients like spices and herbs, and of course has this thing they called "flavor bursts," which just gets you so excited about eating snack foods, especially.

But the other thing is, salt masks off-notes or bad flavors that are inherent to some processed foods. In meat, it’s called "warmed-over flavor," which happens when the fat in meat oxidizes when it reheats, and salt is one of those things that can cover up that taste. So I was really struck. And Kellogg invited me into their research and development department, made for me special versions of their icons, like Cheez-Its, which I could normally eat all day long. Without any salt, it was the most God-awful experience you can imagine, tasting those items. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

AMYGOODMAN: Michael Moss, I want to thank you for being with us. His book is called Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. His cover story in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food." This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Michael Moss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. He won in 2010 for his investigation into the dangers of contaminated meat.

But we’re not leaving food. When we come back, we’ll be joined by another New York Times reporter, Melanie Warner, who wrote Pandora’s Lunchbox. You don’t want to miss it—or maybe you do. It depends on what you’re eating these days. Stay with us.

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Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500Pandora's Lunchbox: Pulling Back the Curtain on How Processed Food Took Over the American Mealhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/1/pandoras_lunchbox_pulling_back_the_curtain
tag:democracynow.org,2013-03-01:en/story/472e02 AMY GOODMAN : As we continue deep inside the $1-trillion-a-year &quot;processed-food-industrial complex,&quot; we turn to look at how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive and most nutritionally inferior food in the world. And the vitamins and protein added back to this processed food? Well, you might be surprised to know where they come from. That&#8217;s the focus of a new book by longtime food reporter Melanie Warner, author of Pandora&#8217;s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal .
Melanie, welcome to Democracy Now! She&#8217;s joining us from Denver, Colorado. Vitamins, vitamin-added food. You think you go to the grocery store, and you want to get a little added punch, and you want to ensure that your kids, that your family, has added vitamins. What&#8217;s the problem with that?
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah. Well, hi, Amy. It&#8217;s great to be here.
You know, one of the things with processed food that I found while doing this book, is not only that it has an abundance of the things that Michael was talking about—salt, sugar, fat—it&#8217;s also what it&#8217;s lacking, which, it turns out, is naturally occurring nutrition, in many cases. So that&#8217;s vitamins and minerals and fiber and things like antioxidants.
So, you take something like cereal—you know, you walk down the cereal aisle, and you&#8217;re bombarded with health messages: It&#8217;s high in vitamin D, a good source of calcium, fiber, antioxidants. You see these things all over the package. And one of the things—one of the questions I asked myself when I was starting to work on this book was: Why is it nearly impossible to find a box of cereal in the cereal aisle without vitamins, added vitamins and minerals, in the ingredient list?
And it turns out, because most cereal has very little inherent nutrition. And this is in part because of processing. The processing of food is very intensive. It&#8217;s very—it&#8217;s very technical, and with cereal, can be very damaging to naturally occurring nutrients, especially vitamins and oftentimes fiber. So, what manufacturers do is they add back in vitamins. So, essentially, you see all these wonderful claims on the package, but essentially—and you look at the panel, and you&#8217;re getting 35 percent and 40 percent of your recommended daily allowance of these vitamins, but they&#8217;re essentially added in like a vitamin pill, which many people maybe are already taking in the morning.
And I was really surprised to learn where some of these vitamins come from. I never really thought about it in much detail, as probably most people don&#8217;t. But it turns out that they&#8217;re—these vitamins are not coming from the foods that contain them. Like vitamin C does not come from an orange, and vitamin A does not come from a carrot. It&#8217;s very far from that. They come from things that really aren&#8217;t actually foods. Vitamin D, for instance, was probably the most shocking. It comes from sheep grease, so actually the grease that comes from sheep wool. You have giant barges and container ships that go from Australia and New Zealand over to China, where most of—a lot of our vitamins are produced. About 50 percent of global vitamin production comes from China inside these huge factories, very industrial processes. A lot of vitamins are actually chemical processes.
AMY GOODMAN : Wait.
MELANIE WARNER : And they&#8217;re very technical and complex.
AMY GOODMAN : A lot of people, if they&#8217;re with someone, they&#8217;re looking at them right now. Wait a second. So, China gets all these shipments of sheep wool from Australia, and they&#8217;re pulling the sheep grease off of them to make vitamin D?
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, sheep grease is actually very useful for a lot of things. It can be used to make moisturizer in lip balm. It can be used for industrial purposes, for lubricants for engines and machines and things like that. But one of its uses is to be converted, through a number of chemical steps and chemical processes, to vitamin D, which is added to our food and used in supplements. So, yeah—
AMY GOODMAN : What about—
MELANIE WARNER : —it&#8217;s just one of—
AMY GOODMAN : What about nylon, Melanie? What does nylon have to do with vitamins?
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, it&#8217;s one of—it&#8217;s one of these chemicals that goes into the making of one of the B vitamins. It&#8217;s many—there are many food additives, actually, that are used in food but actually also have industrial purposes associated with them. One of my favorites is a chemical called, a food additive called azodicarbonamide, and that&#8217;s actually used quite extensively in bread and bread-type products, and it&#8217;s used as a dough conditioner and a manufacturing aid. And its main use outside of the manufacturing of bread is for creating foamed plastic, so things like yoga mats.
And I encountered some news articles a number of years ago where a tanker truck overturned on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago carrying azodicarbonamide. And city fire officials had to issue their highest hazmat alert and evacuate everyone up to a half mile downwind because of this chemical spill. So you look at something like that, and you wonder: Is this something that we really want in our morning toast and our—the bread that goes on our turkey sandwiches?
AMY GOODMAN : Well, that&#8217;s a very important question. Now, of course, the processed food industry, the gross sales are enormous, but you may have redefined &quot;gross&quot; sales. Let&#8217;s talk about some of the experiments the scientist Melanie Warner conducted. Talk a little about chicken tenders.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, I&#8217;m not much of a scientist, but a number of years ago, when I started covering the food industry, I became curious about expiration dates that are printed on packages. Pretty much you to go into the supermarket, and every package in the store will have an expiration date on it. And I wondered: Well, what will happen? What do these expiration dates mean, and what will happen after this date has come and gone? Some of these dates are actually quite far out; they&#8217;ll be six to nine months or even more.
So I started collecting a number of food products, and I saved them in my office. And then I would open them after the expiration dates had passed, sometimes long after the expiration dates had passed because I had forgotten about them. And what I found out over time—I collected all kinds of products: cereal, cookies, Pop-Tarts, fast-food meals, frozen dinners, I mean, you name it. I have all kinds of gross stuff in my office at this point.
And what I found—there were a few exceptions—but what I found was that most of this food did not decompose or mold or go bad, even after long, long periods of time. I mean, I started this seven, eight years ago, and I still have slices of cheese that are perfectly orange, processed cheese.
AMY GOODMAN : From years and years and years ago?
MELANIE WARNER : Years and years and years ago, yeah. And they&#8217;re—
AMY GOODMAN : And what keeps their color? And what keeps them looking—
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —completely preserved?
MELANIE WARNER : There are a variety of reasons for this, depending on the product. Sometimes it&#8217;s because of powerful chemical preservatives that are in it. Sometimes it&#8217;s because of additives that lower the acidity of products, so that no microorganisms can grow. And sometimes it&#8217;s because food manufacturers very intentionally remove all the water from products. That&#8217;s the case with cereal and cookies.
AMY GOODMAN : Melanie, right now, for our TV viewers, we&#8217;re showing images of guacamole, bought in a store, presumably—
MELANIE WARNER : Yes, right.
AMY GOODMAN : —you know, maybe even a Whole Foods-type store, you know, a natural food store—
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —and your own guacamole, and the difference how long it&#8217;s preserved.
MELANIE WARNER : Yeah, I think this was an unusual tub of guacamole, and it had an unusual dose of food additives. My husband came back from the store with it one day and said, &quot;Oh, they announced—made an announcement that they made it fresh over at the deli.&quot; So I thought, &quot;Oh, this is great.&quot; And I looked at the ingredients, and there were some ingredients on there that I had never even heard of. And I was spending a lot of time doing research on food additives. So I kind of—I put it away, I stored it in the fridge. And I thought, &quot;Well, I&#8217;ll look into this later and see what these additives are.&quot;
And then, an interesting thing happened about nine months later. I completely forgot about it in the back of the fridge. My mom, who lives with us, she announced that she had tried some of the guacamole. And I thought she was referring to a recent purchase that I had made at a different store that we had bought for a party. But I thought, you know, I think a lot of that&#8217;s—that&#8217;s gone. And it turns out that she had tried the old guacamole, the nine-month-old stuff. And I was horrified, because she&#8217;s an older person, she&#8217;s in her early eighties, and food-borne illness in older people is no small thing. So I was terrified that she was going to be horribly ill. In fact, she wasn&#8217;t. She was—
AMY GOODMAN : Because the guacamole was how old?
MELANIE WARNER : Nine months. It was nine months old, yeah. So—and she had eaten it because it had no mold on it, it didn&#8217;t smell bad. It was a little bit—when I looked at it, it was a little bit discolored around the edges, you know? So some people might have thought, &quot;Oh, maybe I&#8217;m not going to eat it.&quot; But she looked at it and thought, &quot;Oh, this is a nice guacamole.&quot; So... And in the end, thankfully, she had only had a little bit, and she was totally fine. She had no effects whatsoever.
AMY GOODMAN : Melanie, 15 seconds before we end part one of this discussion. What most surprised you?
MELANIE WARNER : I think just the overall extent to which the technology and food science has merged with food production, and the level of engineering that goes and the level of technology and the level of processing that goes into—that goes into our food. And also, the extent to which the FDA is not watching over what goes into our food in terms of food additives very closely.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to—
MELANIE WARNER : I was very—
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to talk soy products in part two. Melanie Warner, longtime journalist covering the food industry, her new is called Pandora&#8217;s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal .
Juan González will be in Phoenix tonight, in Albuquerque, as well in Santa Fe. Check our website at democracynow.org. AMYGOODMAN: As we continue deep inside the $1-trillion-a-year "processed-food-industrial complex," we turn to look at how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive and most nutritionally inferior food in the world. And the vitamins and protein added back to this processed food? Well, you might be surprised to know where they come from. That’s the focus of a new book by longtime food reporter Melanie Warner, author of Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal.

Melanie, welcome to Democracy Now! She’s joining us from Denver, Colorado. Vitamins, vitamin-added food. You think you go to the grocery store, and you want to get a little added punch, and you want to ensure that your kids, that your family, has added vitamins. What’s the problem with that?

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah. Well, hi, Amy. It’s great to be here.

You know, one of the things with processed food that I found while doing this book, is not only that it has an abundance of the things that Michael was talking about—salt, sugar, fat—it’s also what it’s lacking, which, it turns out, is naturally occurring nutrition, in many cases. So that’s vitamins and minerals and fiber and things like antioxidants.

So, you take something like cereal—you know, you walk down the cereal aisle, and you’re bombarded with health messages: It’s high in vitamin D, a good source of calcium, fiber, antioxidants. You see these things all over the package. And one of the things—one of the questions I asked myself when I was starting to work on this book was: Why is it nearly impossible to find a box of cereal in the cereal aisle without vitamins, added vitamins and minerals, in the ingredient list?

And it turns out, because most cereal has very little inherent nutrition. And this is in part because of processing. The processing of food is very intensive. It’s very—it’s very technical, and with cereal, can be very damaging to naturally occurring nutrients, especially vitamins and oftentimes fiber. So, what manufacturers do is they add back in vitamins. So, essentially, you see all these wonderful claims on the package, but essentially—and you look at the panel, and you’re getting 35 percent and 40 percent of your recommended daily allowance of these vitamins, but they’re essentially added in like a vitamin pill, which many people maybe are already taking in the morning.

And I was really surprised to learn where some of these vitamins come from. I never really thought about it in much detail, as probably most people don’t. But it turns out that they’re—these vitamins are not coming from the foods that contain them. Like vitamin C does not come from an orange, and vitamin A does not come from a carrot. It’s very far from that. They come from things that really aren’t actually foods. Vitamin D, for instance, was probably the most shocking. It comes from sheep grease, so actually the grease that comes from sheep wool. You have giant barges and container ships that go from Australia and New Zealand over to China, where most of—a lot of our vitamins are produced. About 50 percent of global vitamin production comes from China inside these huge factories, very industrial processes. A lot of vitamins are actually chemical processes.

AMYGOODMAN: Wait.

MELANIEWARNER: And they’re very technical and complex.

AMYGOODMAN: A lot of people, if they’re with someone, they’re looking at them right now. Wait a second. So, China gets all these shipments of sheep wool from Australia, and they’re pulling the sheep grease off of them to make vitamin D?

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah, sheep grease is actually very useful for a lot of things. It can be used to make moisturizer in lip balm. It can be used for industrial purposes, for lubricants for engines and machines and things like that. But one of its uses is to be converted, through a number of chemical steps and chemical processes, to vitamin D, which is added to our food and used in supplements. So, yeah—

AMYGOODMAN: What about—

MELANIEWARNER: —it’s just one of—

AMYGOODMAN: What about nylon, Melanie? What does nylon have to do with vitamins?

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah, it’s one of—it’s one of these chemicals that goes into the making of one of the B vitamins. It’s many—there are many food additives, actually, that are used in food but actually also have industrial purposes associated with them. One of my favorites is a chemical called, a food additive called azodicarbonamide, and that’s actually used quite extensively in bread and bread-type products, and it’s used as a dough conditioner and a manufacturing aid. And its main use outside of the manufacturing of bread is for creating foamed plastic, so things like yoga mats.

And I encountered some news articles a number of years ago where a tanker truck overturned on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago carrying azodicarbonamide. And city fire officials had to issue their highest hazmat alert and evacuate everyone up to a half mile downwind because of this chemical spill. So you look at something like that, and you wonder: Is this something that we really want in our morning toast and our—the bread that goes on our turkey sandwiches?

AMYGOODMAN: Well, that’s a very important question. Now, of course, the processed food industry, the gross sales are enormous, but you may have redefined "gross" sales. Let’s talk about some of the experiments the scientist Melanie Warner conducted. Talk a little about chicken tenders.

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah, I’m not much of a scientist, but a number of years ago, when I started covering the food industry, I became curious about expiration dates that are printed on packages. Pretty much you to go into the supermarket, and every package in the store will have an expiration date on it. And I wondered: Well, what will happen? What do these expiration dates mean, and what will happen after this date has come and gone? Some of these dates are actually quite far out; they’ll be six to nine months or even more.

So I started collecting a number of food products, and I saved them in my office. And then I would open them after the expiration dates had passed, sometimes long after the expiration dates had passed because I had forgotten about them. And what I found out over time—I collected all kinds of products: cereal, cookies, Pop-Tarts, fast-food meals, frozen dinners, I mean, you name it. I have all kinds of gross stuff in my office at this point.

And what I found—there were a few exceptions—but what I found was that most of this food did not decompose or mold or go bad, even after long, long periods of time. I mean, I started this seven, eight years ago, and I still have slices of cheese that are perfectly orange, processed cheese.

AMYGOODMAN: From years and years and years ago?

MELANIEWARNER: Years and years and years ago, yeah. And they’re—

AMYGOODMAN: And what keeps their color? And what keeps them looking—

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: —completely preserved?

MELANIEWARNER: There are a variety of reasons for this, depending on the product. Sometimes it’s because of powerful chemical preservatives that are in it. Sometimes it’s because of additives that lower the acidity of products, so that no microorganisms can grow. And sometimes it’s because food manufacturers very intentionally remove all the water from products. That’s the case with cereal and cookies.

AMYGOODMAN: —and your own guacamole, and the difference how long it’s preserved.

MELANIEWARNER: Yeah, I think this was an unusual tub of guacamole, and it had an unusual dose of food additives. My husband came back from the store with it one day and said, "Oh, they announced—made an announcement that they made it fresh over at the deli." So I thought, "Oh, this is great." And I looked at the ingredients, and there were some ingredients on there that I had never even heard of. And I was spending a lot of time doing research on food additives. So I kind of—I put it away, I stored it in the fridge. And I thought, "Well, I’ll look into this later and see what these additives are."

And then, an interesting thing happened about nine months later. I completely forgot about it in the back of the fridge. My mom, who lives with us, she announced that she had tried some of the guacamole. And I thought she was referring to a recent purchase that I had made at a different store that we had bought for a party. But I thought, you know, I think a lot of that’s—that’s gone. And it turns out that she had tried the old guacamole, the nine-month-old stuff. And I was horrified, because she’s an older person, she’s in her early eighties, and food-borne illness in older people is no small thing. So I was terrified that she was going to be horribly ill. In fact, she wasn’t. She was—

AMYGOODMAN: Because the guacamole was how old?

MELANIEWARNER: Nine months. It was nine months old, yeah. So—and she had eaten it because it had no mold on it, it didn’t smell bad. It was a little bit—when I looked at it, it was a little bit discolored around the edges, you know? So some people might have thought, "Oh, maybe I’m not going to eat it." But she looked at it and thought, "Oh, this is a nice guacamole." So... And in the end, thankfully, she had only had a little bit, and she was totally fine. She had no effects whatsoever.

AMYGOODMAN: Melanie, 15 seconds before we end part one of this discussion. What most surprised you?

MELANIEWARNER: I think just the overall extent to which the technology and food science has merged with food production, and the level of engineering that goes and the level of technology and the level of processing that goes into—that goes into our food. And also, the extent to which the FDA is not watching over what goes into our food in terms of food additives very closely.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to—

MELANIEWARNER: I was very—

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to talk soy products in part two. Melanie Warner, longtime journalist covering the food industry, her new is called Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal.

Juan González will be in Phoenix tonight, in Albuquerque, as well in Santa Fe. Check our website at democracynow.org.

]]>
Thu, 28 Feb 2013 12:57:00 -0500Behind the Brands: On Food Justice, Oxfam Gives Coca-Cola, Kellogg's, Nestlé & Pepsi Failing Gradeshttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/27/behind_the_brands_on_food_justice
tag:democracynow.org,2013-02-27:en/story/c5117a NERMEEN SHAIKH : Many Americans wake up to a bowl of Kellogg&#8217;s Corn Flakes and a glass of Tropicana orange juice, but few know the true story behind their favorite food products. Now, Oxfam America has released a comprehensive report that measures how the world&#8217;s 10 largest food companies perform on food justice issues. The report is the culmination of an 18-month investigation, and it&#8217;s called &quot;Behind the Brands.&quot; The 10 companies Oxfam scores are Associated British Foods, Coca-Cola, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg&#8217;s, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever. Collectively, these companies make $1 billion a day, according to Oxfam. No company emerges with passing grades.
Oxfam has also launched an interactive website accompanying the report, which grades each of the companies according to seven criteria: small-scale farmers, farm workers, water, land, climate change, women&#8217;s rights and transparency.
AMY GOODMAN : Democracy Now! reached out to several of the companies named in Oxfam&#8217;s report, but not all responded in time for our broadcast. General Mills responded saying, quote, &quot;These are topics General Mills cares about, as we too want to ensure the future of the world&#8217;s food supply. We will continue efforts to advance our work in these areas as part of our commitment to global sustainability.&quot;
Well, for more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we&#8217;re joined by Chris Jochnick, the director of private sector engagement at Oxfam America, one of the lead researchers for the new report, &quot;Behind the Brands,&quot; also co-founder of the Center for Economic and Social Rights.
Chris, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about what you found in this report. Don&#8217;t be afraid to name names.
CHRIS JOCHNICK : Thanks, Amy. Nice to be back.
What we found is that, across these seven issues that you just mentioned—farm workers, women, water, land, greenhouse gas emissions—all of the 10 companies have some projects in the field, are doing some things right, but in general are failing to do what they could do to create a better system that ensures that all of the people in the food chain, from the farmers all the way to the consumers, benefit from it in some way.
And in particular, what we found is a lot of opacity. It&#8217;s just very difficult for people to understand, as your lead-in said, what goes on behind their bowl of Kellogg&#8217;s or their drinks from Pepsi. That whole system is very obscure. And so, in particular, we were putting a spotlight on questions of transparency and accountability. We&#8217;re trying to ask companies, do they actually know how women are treated in their supply chains? Do they know how many women are in their supply chains? Do they recognize the unfair treatment of smallholder farmers and workers or the threats to their land and water, and are they reporting on it? So, we were trying to focus on those larger bigger-ticket issues that go largely unaddressed by most of the companies.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Chris Jochnick, many of the companies you examine in your report purport to engage in socially conscientious, sustainable activities. For example, this month General Mills announced a program to provide access to training and education to several hundred small vanilla farmers in Madagascar to help them produce a more sustainable and higher-quality vanilla crop. This is General Mills&#8217; company director, Steve Peterson.
STEVE PETERSON : What we&#8217;re trying to do is actually teach them to do more value-added work on their farm, specifically curing of the bean. And that will allow them to potentially double the amount of income that they can get from growing the bean plus curing it.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : That was General Mills&#8217; company director, Steve Peterson. Chris Jochnick, your response to what he said?
CHRIS JOCHNICK : Well, we know that some of the companies are doing good projects like that in the field, and Oxfam has actually worked with some of those companies to help them improve the way they&#8217;re doing business in the field. But this report looks at something at a broader level. It&#8217;s not just those pilot projects or smaller projects that we want to get at. We want to understand how the—not just the few hundred or few thousand farmers are faring, but how the hundreds of millions of farmers are faring throughout this global food system. And so, we didn&#8217;t try to go into the field and examine projects project by project, and we also didn&#8217;t look at scandal by scandal. We were taking a broader look at whether the companies are doing their due diligence. Are they reporting on it? Are they transparent about it? And are they forcing these commitments that they have publicly made to sustainability and to farmers—are they forcing them down through the supply chain, where we know they exercise enormous influence? And so, those—
AMY GOODMAN : Asso—
CHRIS JOCHNICK : —are the sort of issues that we wanted to look at.
AMY GOODMAN : Associated British Foods, or ABF , was the company with the lowest score. It scored just one mark out of the 10 in its treatment of land, women, climate change. Its highest score was just three out of 10 in relation to workers and transparency. But an ABF spokesperson rejected Oxfam&#8217;s criticism. The unnamed spokesperson told The Guardian newspaper, quote, &quot;The idea that ABF would use a &#39;veil of secrecy&#39; in order to hide the &#39;human cost&#39; of its supply chain is simply ridiculous. We treat local producers, communities and the environment with the utmost respect. As for transparency ... our next CR report in autumn 2013 will confirm significant improvement in disclosure.&quot; Your response?
CHRIS JOCHNICK : Well, in some ways, I think his response says a lot. His next report will apparently be more transparent. We know that none of the companies are reporting, across the commodities, where they&#8217;re buying them from, in what volumes, to what extent they&#8217;re certified or not, who their suppliers are. None of that level of transparency exists in this system, so we give failing grades for almost all the companies in terms of their basic transparency. And without that transparency, we can&#8217;t even have a conversation about whether or not they&#8217;re really being sustainable. So, companies can make those kinds of commitments, and they can do pilot projects, and they can highlight those projects on their website, but at the end of the day, if they&#8217;re not telling us who they&#8217;re sourcing from, if they&#8217;re not telling us in what volumes—
AMY GOODMAN : Chris, we have 10 seconds. What most surprised you from what you found?
CHRIS JOCHNICK : Just the general lack of disclosure across the board and the lack of basic policies on issues like land and water.
AMY GOODMAN : We want to thank you for being with us, and we will link to your report . Chris Jochnick is the director of private sector engagement at Oxfam America. The latest report, &quot;Behind the Brands.&quot; NERMEENSHAIKH: Many Americans wake up to a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and a glass of Tropicana orange juice, but few know the true story behind their favorite food products. Now, Oxfam America has released a comprehensive report that measures how the world’s 10 largest food companies perform on food justice issues. The report is the culmination of an 18-month investigation, and it’s called "Behind the Brands." The 10 companies Oxfam scores are Associated British Foods, Coca-Cola, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever. Collectively, these companies make $1 billion a day, according to Oxfam. No company emerges with passing grades.

Oxfam has also launched an interactive website accompanying the report, which grades each of the companies according to seven criteria: small-scale farmers, farm workers, water, land, climate change, women’s rights and transparency.

AMYGOODMAN:Democracy Now! reached out to several of the companies named in Oxfam’s report, but not all responded in time for our broadcast. General Mills responded saying, quote, "These are topics General Mills cares about, as we too want to ensure the future of the world’s food supply. We will continue efforts to advance our work in these areas as part of our commitment to global sustainability."

Well, for more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Chris Jochnick, the director of private sector engagement at Oxfam America, one of the lead researchers for the new report, "Behind the Brands," also co-founder of the Center for Economic and Social Rights.

Chris, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about what you found in this report. Don’t be afraid to name names.

CHRISJOCHNICK: Thanks, Amy. Nice to be back.

What we found is that, across these seven issues that you just mentioned—farm workers, women, water, land, greenhouse gas emissions—all of the 10 companies have some projects in the field, are doing some things right, but in general are failing to do what they could do to create a better system that ensures that all of the people in the food chain, from the farmers all the way to the consumers, benefit from it in some way.

And in particular, what we found is a lot of opacity. It’s just very difficult for people to understand, as your lead-in said, what goes on behind their bowl of Kellogg’s or their drinks from Pepsi. That whole system is very obscure. And so, in particular, we were putting a spotlight on questions of transparency and accountability. We’re trying to ask companies, do they actually know how women are treated in their supply chains? Do they know how many women are in their supply chains? Do they recognize the unfair treatment of smallholder farmers and workers or the threats to their land and water, and are they reporting on it? So, we were trying to focus on those larger bigger-ticket issues that go largely unaddressed by most of the companies.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Chris Jochnick, many of the companies you examine in your report purport to engage in socially conscientious, sustainable activities. For example, this month General Mills announced a program to provide access to training and education to several hundred small vanilla farmers in Madagascar to help them produce a more sustainable and higher-quality vanilla crop. This is General Mills’ company director, Steve Peterson.

STEVEPETERSON: What we’re trying to do is actually teach them to do more value-added work on their farm, specifically curing of the bean. And that will allow them to potentially double the amount of income that they can get from growing the bean plus curing it.

NERMEENSHAIKH: That was General Mills’ company director, Steve Peterson. Chris Jochnick, your response to what he said?

CHRISJOCHNICK: Well, we know that some of the companies are doing good projects like that in the field, and Oxfam has actually worked with some of those companies to help them improve the way they’re doing business in the field. But this report looks at something at a broader level. It’s not just those pilot projects or smaller projects that we want to get at. We want to understand how the—not just the few hundred or few thousand farmers are faring, but how the hundreds of millions of farmers are faring throughout this global food system. And so, we didn’t try to go into the field and examine projects project by project, and we also didn’t look at scandal by scandal. We were taking a broader look at whether the companies are doing their due diligence. Are they reporting on it? Are they transparent about it? And are they forcing these commitments that they have publicly made to sustainability and to farmers—are they forcing them down through the supply chain, where we know they exercise enormous influence? And so, those—

AMYGOODMAN: Asso—

CHRISJOCHNICK: —are the sort of issues that we wanted to look at.

AMYGOODMAN: Associated British Foods, or ABF, was the company with the lowest score. It scored just one mark out of the 10 in its treatment of land, women, climate change. Its highest score was just three out of 10 in relation to workers and transparency. But an ABF spokesperson rejected Oxfam’s criticism. The unnamed spokesperson told The Guardian newspaper, quote, "The idea that ABF would use a 'veil of secrecy' in order to hide the 'human cost' of its supply chain is simply ridiculous. We treat local producers, communities and the environment with the utmost respect. As for transparency ... our next CR report in autumn 2013 will confirm significant improvement in disclosure." Your response?

CHRISJOCHNICK: Well, in some ways, I think his response says a lot. His next report will apparently be more transparent. We know that none of the companies are reporting, across the commodities, where they’re buying them from, in what volumes, to what extent they’re certified or not, who their suppliers are. None of that level of transparency exists in this system, so we give failing grades for almost all the companies in terms of their basic transparency. And without that transparency, we can’t even have a conversation about whether or not they’re really being sustainable. So, companies can make those kinds of commitments, and they can do pilot projects, and they can highlight those projects on their website, but at the end of the day, if they’re not telling us who they’re sourcing from, if they’re not telling us in what volumes—

AMYGOODMAN: Chris, we have 10 seconds. What most surprised you from what you found?

CHRISJOCHNICK: Just the general lack of disclosure across the board and the lack of basic policies on issues like land and water.

AMYGOODMAN: We want to thank you for being with us, and we will link to your report. Chris Jochnick is the director of private sector engagement at Oxfam America. The latest report, "Behind the Brands."